Mass retirement looms in NIA over Buhari’s appointment of Abubakar

The recent appointment of Ahmed Rufai Abubakar as the Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) has continue to elicit negative reactions from the intelligence community in general and the NIA in particular.

Findings by Persecond News indicate that the NIA, since its establishment, is run as a closed-knitted family of hardcore professionals.

The security institution equally boasts of some of the finest analysts and operatives in the intelligence business that display low-key life in both public and private conduct.

It was gathered that now that Abubakar will be given the rank of an Ambassador, his appointment will automatically pave the way for massive retirement of senior directors in the Agency who are his seniors and his other colleagues who sat and passed their 2011 promotion examinations which he couldn’t scale through.

A concerned intelligence officer confided in our correspondent saying; “The agency is like an open book, everyone knows those who are better than him and those he is better than.”

The new DG of NIA, Abubakar is said to hail from Katsina, but was born in Chad where he spent most of his childhood and early adult life. It was gathered that his first marriage with a Chadian woman short-lived.

It was further gathered that after his graduation from Bayero University, Kano, he joined the Katsina State Civil Service but was later recruited into the NIA by his cousin, Ambassador Zakari Ibrahim, who was then the DG of the agency. But in spite of his language skills, Abubakar failed to impress just as his productivity file was alleged to have shown abysmal performance appraisal.

For instance, in 2011, he sat and failed his promotion exams to the rank of a director thus had to retire, but at that point in time, he was hurriedly seconded to the United Nations office in Dakar where he worked with the former ECOWAS Secretary-General, Mohammed Ibn Chambas. Part of his posting included a tour of duty in Morocco.

Abubakar is believed to be highly resentful to United States and an avowed anti-Semitic and therefore aborted a scheduled side talk meeting between President Buhari and the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in New York during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017.

A statement by the presidency said Abubakar briefly served as Senior Adviser at the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), with headquarters in Ndjamena, Chad, before his appointment as SSAP.

He also had extensive experience working with the United Nations in peace support operations, mediation process, preventive diplomacy and good offices, as well as the promotion of good governance and respect for the rule of law and human rights.