Allan Kilavuka: Former Kenya Airways CEO, Coffee Farmer and Leadership Speaker

Allan Kilavuka no longer has an executive assistant, and he says it shows. In an interview with the Business Daily this week he admitted he is struggling with his own calendar, and that messages to him can sit unanswered because half the time he is out on a farm in Kitale with his hands in the soil. For six years he ran Kenya Airways. Now Kenyans are searching his name because the man who steered the national carrier out of the pandemic is picking coffee cherries in Trans Nzoia.

From Kericho to the University of Nairobi

Kilavuka was born in Kisumu and raised in Kericho, on the grounds of the Tea Research Foundation. He told the Business Daily that growing up among scientists left him with a taste for order and for decisions based on data, a habit he says stuck. He studied commerce at the University of Nairobi and later took a certificate in psychology from the University of Liverpool. He also attended executive programmes at General Electric’s Crotonville leadership institute in New York State, according to Wikipedia.

The psychology thread is worth noting. He says he reads psychology, philosophy and faith texts in his study, and in the interview he talks about emotional intelligence the way other executives talk about cash flow.

Deloitte, General Electric and a move to South Africa

Before aviation, Kilavuka worked at Deloitte and then at GE, rising to lead the company’s business in sub-Saharan Africa. That job took him to South Africa, where he lived for a time. He mentions the posting mostly to complain about the tea, but the years at GE are where he picked up the operating discipline he later applied at the airline. They also explain a quirk of his career: he came to the top of Kenya’s best-known airline as an outsider to flying, a corporate operator rather than a pilot or an aviation engineer.

Jambojet and the jump to Kenya Airways

His appointment as chief executive of Jambojet, the low-cost carrier wholly owned by Kenya Airways, was announced in November 2018, and he started in January 2019. He held the post until March 2020. On 1 April 2020 he took over as group chief executive of Kenya Airways, replacing Sebastian Mickosz, who had resigned before the end of his contract.

The timing could hardly have been worse. Air travel had just collapsed under the first Covid lockdowns, and the airline was already carrying heavy debts. One of his first moves was a 25 percent pay cut for top managers, starting that same day, with board members giving up their allowances while it lasted. It was a small amount of money against the size of the problem, but it was a signal about who would feel the pain first.

The reset he wanted and did not get

Looking back in the Business Daily interview, Kilavuka named two things he wishes had gone differently. The first was what he called a reset. He wanted to split Kenya Airways into a “bad company” holding the legacy liabilities and a “good company” that could start fresh, using the pandemic as the moment to do it. He says he pushed hard for it, needed the main shareholder behind him, and was outvoted by directors and shareholders. He still believes it was the right call, though it is the kind of claim that only history, and the audited accounts, can settle.

The second was an idea he calls a Pan-African airline group, modelled on LATAM in South America. In his version, Kenya Airways would act as the anchor airline, he says the effort started with South African, and hubs in East, West and Southern Africa, perhaps North Africa too, would schedule and train together. He says Africa’s traffic is fragmented and that the opportunity was lost. Whether regulators and governments would ever have allowed it is a separate matter, and he does not claim the plan was close to happening.

Five years of cost cutting and a first profit

In 2023 the Kenya Airways board extended his contract by three years, to April 2026. Under his leadership the airline trimmed its yearly losses and was expected to move into profit in 2024. A news roundup from Info Kenya credits him with a restructuring called Project Kifaru and a Ksh 5.4 billion after-tax profit for 2024, described as the airline’s first profit in more than ten years. That is a secondary source, so readers should check the figure against the company’s published results.

Not every day was a good one. He told the Business Daily that the Covid years were the period he would most like to forget. Employees died, among them pilots, and he made a point of attending funerals and visiting families personally. He says the temper he had as a young man resurfaces only when someone lies to him, and that corporate life, with its stakeholders, gave him plenty of chances to test it.

Leaving KQ

On 16 December 2025, after a farewell message to staff, Kilavuka went on terminal leave. His contract was due to end on 31 March 2026, according to Tuko, and the airline’s chief operating officer, Captain George Kamal, took over in an acting capacity. In the interview he says he deliberately did very little for three months. He hiked, read, exercised, travelled upcountry and finished a Master’s dissertation. When people came with job offers, his reply was to talk to him after April.

How an avocado failure became a coffee farm

The coffee story starts with a run of failed crops. His farm in Kitale had been growing maize, which he gave up on because it lost money. He tried canola and beans, then half an acre of avocado, which he abandoned because ripe avocados have to be picked and sold at once. On a trip to Brazil he sat next to a Kenyan coffee processor who asked whether he had tried coffee, and walked him through the numbers.

His reasoning is plain. Coffee can be harvested, dried and stored if the price is wrong, so the returns may not be glorious but they are something. He planted ten acres. The trees are now about 30 months old, and he has just brought in his first crop. He says he does not only supervise. He puts on farm clothes and picks, starting around six in the morning, and he jokes that workers feel they cannot leave while the boss is still going.

Trans Nzoia is a notable place for this. It is known as Kenya’s maize belt, and Tuko, citing an estimate, says about 8,000 acres there are now under coffee and sugarcane as farmers chase better returns. Coverage of his Instagram posts shows him holding ripe cherries in the plantation. Reaction online has been mixed, with some praising the move and others questioning his priorities and politics, as the Info Kenya report notes. He has not published the farm’s production figures, and this article does not guess at them.

Consulting, boards and Strathmore

Retirement, as he describes it, is more like a change of schedule. He runs a small consulting firm, gives talks on leadership, ethics and servant leadership, teaches executive classes at Strathmore Business School, and sits on a few boards he says he chose carefully. He says the best part is controlling his time and being able to decline an invitation that does not interest him. He would consider returning to corporate life, but only for a company that fits his purpose.

He summarises his outlook as four Fs: faith, friends, family and fun. He says the job was one route toward them rather than the point.

What the phone tells him

One of the more candid passages in the interview is about his phone. Every couple of weeks he calls a chief executive or a Cabinet minister to see who still answers. About half do not. He says he expected it and treats it as a filter, since it shows who is genuine and who only wanted something. A principal secretary who stopped him in Mombasa last week is, in his telling, one of the exceptions.

What to take from his story

Kilavuka’s career is a fairly clean example of a Kenyan executive who came up through professional services and a multinational, ran a state-linked airline through its hardest stretch, and then left on terms he chose. Judgements on his tenure differ and depend on which numbers a reader trusts. Supporters point to the restructuring and the return to profit. Some online commenters question his priorities and politics, as the Info Kenya report notes, though none of the sources used here sets out a detailed case against his record. This profile does not try to settle the argument.

Within the last week Kenyans have mostly been interested in the farm, and that is probably the right place to end. A man who spent years in boardrooms now says his best moments involve a short coffee bush and a red cherry that, in his words, calls to be picked.

Sources

• Business Daily
• Tuko
• Info Kenya
• Wikipedia