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By Yakubu Abubakar
 
The recent appointment of Ahmed Rufai Abubakar as the Director-General of National Intelligence Agency (NIA) has elicited lots of negative reactions from the intelligence community in general and the NIA in particular.
 
The NIA, since its establishment the NIA is run as a close-knit family of hardcore professionals. The institution boasts of the finest analysts and operatives in the intelligence business. Most were usually low-keyed in both in public and private conduct. “Inside though, the agency is like an open book, everyone knows those who are better than them and those  they better than”, an analyst said.
  
That, basically is the source of the problem now brewing in the agency. The new D-G, Abubakar,  hails from Katsina, but he was born in Chad where he spent most of his childhood and early adult life. His first marriage was with a Chadian woman; the marriage was short-lived.
  
After his graduation from Bayero University, Kano, he joined Katsina State Civil Service. Ambassador Zakari Ibrahim, his cousin recruited him into the NIA.
 
Despite his language skills, (he speaks multiple languages) Abubakar failed to impress and his productivity file was alleged to show abysmal performance appraisal.
  
In 2011, he sat and failed his promotion examination to the rank of a director.  Consequently, he had to retire, but respite came his way when at the nick of time, he was seconded to the United Nations office in Dakar where he worked with former ECOWAS Secretary-General, Mohammed Ibn Chambas.  That saved his job. Part of his posting included a tour of duty in Morocco where against the Agency and Service regulations, he married a Moroccan.
 
Most worrisome to top NIA operatives, Abubakar was alleged to be highly resentful to United States and is said to be an avowed anti-Semitic.  He was said to have been among those who aborted  the scheduled side talk meeting between President Mohammed Buhari and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in New York during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017.
 
Now Abubakar will be given the rank of Ambassador in-situ and his appointment will 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 with him.
 
An initial disquiet at the NIA stemmed from the appointment of Ambassador Babagana Kingibe as head of the panel, to study and make recommendation on the Agency’s administrative, technical and operational future. The Independent reported the existence of that panel as well as its work at the NIA exclusively.  A top shot at the NIA said that as this appointment exhibits, “Corruption is not stealing public funds only, nepotism and peddling influence are the worst forms of corruption”.
 
The committee made of Ambassador Kingibe as the chairman, had Ambassador Zakari Ibrahim and Ambassador Niyi Oladeji along with Chief AK Horsfall  as members. Unknown to many the Chief of Staff to the President Mallam Abba Kyari included Ahmed Rufai Abubakar a staffer in his office as an additional member.
  
The other discontent that resulted from the panel’s work was that most intelligence professionals view Ambassador Kingibe as an ignorant interloper – as he was never an intelligence officer by training or practice. When he was in the Foreign Ministry, many of his colleagues expressed surprise how he rose to became an ambassador, bearing in mind his alleged personal discipline problems  and his controversial marriage to Canadian – which many still view today as being  against extant Foreign Services rules and regulations.
 
Many think that Kingibe has been a dyed in the wool security hand. But the nearest he came to intelligence work was that he was made a Permanent Secretary, Office of Special Service. The office is for any routine civil servant to be deployed to at the pleasure of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF).  This time around, Kingibe has maneuvered himself into the Buhari administration’s inner circle or “cabal”, made of Mamman Daura, the President’s cousin, Abba Kyari, his Chief of Staff and Lawal Daura, the Director-General of Department of State Service, amongst others.
 
It is from that vantage point that he brought in his Special Assistant, when he served as African Union Envoy in Darfur 2005, Ahmed Rufai Abubakar to be President Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on International Affairs.  From there he is now the DG of NIA!

 There is another controversy surrounding Kingibe; that he and Abubakar were the architects of Nigeria’s foreign policy dilemma of scheming for Morocco, a North African country to become a member of ECOWAS.  This is why they are derisively called in the diplomatic circles “the draftsmen of fertilizer and Titus sardine diplomacy”; the appellation came because of their relationship with Morocco.