President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday approved the appointment of Engr Aliyu Aziz Abubakar, as the new director general and chief executive officer of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC).
Aziz was a pioneer staff of NIMC and the director, Information Technology/ National Identity Database department of NIMC before he retired in 2014. With more than 30 years’ of post qualification experience in Engineering and Information Technology, spanning both the private and public sectors, he holds a B.Eng in Civil Engineering and M.Sc in Structural Engineering with Specialty in Computer Aided Design from the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria.
A statement by Abdul-Hamid Umar, General Manager, Corporate Communications, NIMC said Aziz was also a Deputy Director, Information Technology at the Bureau of Public Enterprises and the Principal Consultant, Management Information System (MIS) Department, Afri-Projects Consortium.
He was a director at the Secretariat of the Presidential Implementation Committee in the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) office saddled with the responsibilities for the Implementation of Government Decisions on Consumer Credit System, National Outsourcing Initiative and Harmonization of Identification Schemes in Nigeria. The committee oversaw the setting up of the National Identity Management Commission in 2007.
Abubakar is a member of several professional bodies, including the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Nigerian Institution of Structural Engineers (NIStructE) where he is the current Vice President. He is also a member of the Computer Association of Nigeria (COAN) and the Internet Society (ISOC). He is widely travelled and an alumnus of Harvard, Stanford, IMD and Lagos Business School.