There was once a village plagued by livestock theft. So they hired a watchman. Each night, he locked the front gate, inspected the fence, and logged everything in his notebook. Every morning, he presented his report: “No breach. All controls in place.” Yet the goats kept disappearing. Turns out, the thief wasn’t breaking in. He was the trusted farmhand, walking out through the side gate, laughing at the audit reports. This is the tragedy of Risk-Based Internal auditing today. We are securing the gates our frameworks told us to monitor, while real risk walks out the side door of flawed…

I once visited a factory in Namanve where the manager’s office had no door. Not because the company was broke, but because, according to him, “I want to be accessible at all times.” Noble idea. Deadly in execution. Every five minutes, someone walked in. A supplier with an invoice. A technician with a broken switch. A clerk asking for airtime. At the end of my shadowing day, the manager had completed zero high-value work. He had traded accessibility for irrelevance. If you are always available, you are never effective. The problem is not the distractions. It is your tolerance for them. We glorify…