Why Private-Sector Excellence Doesn’t Guarantee Public Leadership in Kenya

By Risper Atieno

Kenya has developed a familiar habit of recruiting distinguished corporate executives to rescue struggling public institutions. The assumption is if someone has successfully led multinational companies, they can surely reform government agencies. Recent history has, however, repeatedly challenged that belief. Public institutions operate under a different logic shaped by politics, vested interests, bureaucracy, and competing centres of power.

Philip Kinisu’s The Interrupted Accountant: My Long Journey to the Mountaintop is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of this reality.

The autobiography examines the limits of private-sector excellence when transplanted into public service. His experience demonstrates that leadership, however distinguished, cannot succeed where systems are designed to resist reform.

It opens with an inspiring account of Kinisu’s rise from rural Kenya to the summit of the accounting profession. During a career spanning more than three decades at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), he rose to become Territory Senior Partner for Eastern Africa and Chairman of the PwC Africa Board. His career reflects everything associated with corporate success, including discipline, technical excellence, strategic thinking, accountability, and merit-based leadership. Retirement could easily have marked the culmination of that remarkable journey.

Instead, Kinisu answered a patriotic call to serve as Chairman of Kenya’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), believing that the principles which had delivered success in the corporate world could equally strengthen a public institution charged with fighting corruption.

Away from leading an institution eager for reform, Kinisu found himself navigating court injunctions, political interference, internal resistance, public suspicion, and even threats to his personal safety. The management tools that proved effective in a global professional services firm offered limited solutions within an environment where legal, political, and institutional interests constantly intersected.

In the private sector, leadership is generally rewarded through measurable performance, efficiency, and predictable governance structures. In public institutions, success often depends on negotiating political landmines that lie beyond managerial competence.

Kinisu does not suggest that integrity failed him. Rather, he demonstrates that integrity alone is insufficient when institutions lack the structural conditions necessary for reform. His frustration emerges not from personal disappointment but from recognising that even capable leadership has limits when systems are resistant to change.

Kenya has repeatedly witnessed accomplished bankers, lawyers, accountants, and business executives appointed to head public institutions, only to leave the helm shortly after. Government agencies operate within competing political interests, constitutional constraints, public expectations, and bureaucratic cultures that cannot simply be managed as one would manage a private enterprise.

Kinisu reminds Kenyans that governance is not simply a matter of appointing competent individuals. It requires systems capable of supporting integrity rather than frustrating it. Until that happens, Kenya may continue celebrating distinguished corporate leaders as public-sector saviours, only to watch many of them fall by the wayside.

That is what makes The Interrupted Accountant an important record of the persistent challenge of leadership in Kenya’s public institutions.

Click here to get your copy of “The Interrupted Accountant” by Philip Kinisu.

The writer is a research assistant at Free Press Publishers.