President Bola Tinubu has appointed Ambassador Ismail Yusuf as the new Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the National Hajj Commission.
The President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanugu, announced the appointment in a statement released on Wednesday, noting that it is subject to Senate confirmation in line with Section 3(2) of the NAHCON Act, 2026.
“President Tinubu sent a letter today to the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, requesting the expeditious confirmation of Ambassador Yusuf to replace Professor Abdullahi Usman, who resigned this week, after about 14 months in the post,” the statement read.
Yusuf is an experienced Nigerian career diplomat who served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Türkiye between 2021 and 2024.
Yusuf’s appointment follows the reported resignation of Professor Abdullahi Usman as NAHCON chairman a day earlier.
As of the time of this report, no official explanation had been provided for his resignation.
Usman was appointed NAHCON chairman by President Tinubu in 2024 and supervised his first Hajj operations in 2025, marking his initial experience managing Nigeria’s Hajj affairs at the national level.
He had been selected in 2024 to succeed Jalal Arabi, who was removed from office by President Tinubu.
At the time of his dismissal, Arabi was under investigation for allegedly mismanaging funds allocated by the federal government for the 2024 Islamic pilgrimage.
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