Five years ago, I sat across a board chair in the agriculture value addition space. The CEO had been sacked after a procurement scandal involving ghost suppliers and inflated invoices. But here’s the twist: six months earlier, the board had praised this same CEO for “excellent turnaround results.” Why? The numbers looked good. Profits were up. No one asked what fuelled the miracle. That, right there, is the silent rot that boards allow to fester. The point is simple: the tone of ethics is set by the board, not the CEO. When the board fails to ask the uncomfortable questions,…

I visited Karamoja in 2017 as part of the World Health Organization (WHO), anti-fraud risk management experts. In the evening, we had dinner with old men, one of them told us of a hunter who clutched his father’s map, drawn with charcoal on bark cloth. Every morning, he set out with pride, tracing the same route. But the rivers had moved. The forest had burned. The buffalo no longer grazed there. He returned empty-handed every day. Until he died, not of hunger, but of refusing to see the change, and adapt. That’s the story of many modern professionals. Especially risk…