[Insight]
The Conflict of Interest Act Arrives at Its First Deadline
[Insight]
The Conflict of Interest Act Arrives at Its First Deadline
Opening Perspective
Kenya’s Conflict of Interest Act was assented on 30 July 2025 and commenced the following month, repealing the Public Officer Ethics Act that had governed public sector integrity for two decades. Its first real test arrived on 31 July 2026, the date by which responsible commissions were required to submit compliance reports to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. That deadline separated institutions with functioning declaration systems from institutions with integrity policies. The gap between those two things is where the next phase of Kenya’s governance reform will be decided, and it is now backed by donor conditionality: the World Bank’s USD 750 million development policy operation explicitly supports implementation of the new regime.
What the Act Actually Requires
The Act moves Kenya from a disclosure culture to a declaration system, and the distinction is operational rather than semantic.
Public officers, including county officials and senior judicial officers, must declare income, assets, and liabilities on appointment, every two years thereafter, and on exit from office. Declarations are filed to the EACC through prescribed responsible commissions, which in turn submit compliance reports in a prescribed template. The Act places a positive duty on each officer to avoid real, apparent, or potential conflicts in connection with official duties and to disclose private interests affecting those duties. Restrictions extend to secondary employment that could undermine official responsibilities. Enforcement covers complaints, investigation, and disciplinary or criminal proceedings, with penalties including fines and imprisonment, and provisions addressing forfeiture of undeclared or unexplained assets.
Three features distinguish this from what came before. Declarations are periodic and lifecycle-based rather than occasional. Institutions, not just individuals, carry reporting obligations. And the standard extends beyond actual conflict to apparent and potential conflict, which is a materially harder test to administer.
A conflict of interest regime does not run on intent. It runs on registers, calendars, filing systems, and someone whose job it is to notice a missing declaration. Institutions that treat this as a policy statement will discover the difference at their first compliance report.
ACAL Advisory Team
Public Sector Advisory
Key Insights
1. The obligation is institutional, and most institutions are not built for it
An officer can only declare if someone maintains the register, tracks the two-year cycle, chases the appointment and exit triggers, and assembles the compliance report. That is a records management function with a compliance calendar attached, and few public entities have designated ownership for it. The failure mode will not be officers refusing to declare. It will be institutions unable to demonstrate that everyone did.
2. Apparent and potential conflict raises the analytical bar
Actual conflict is relatively easy to identify after the fact. Apparent and potential conflict require judgment applied in advance, which means an institution needs criteria, a route for officers to seek guidance, and a documented record of decisions taken. Without those, officers face a standard they cannot reliably meet and institutions face findings they cannot defend.
3. Procurement and board appointments are where the exposure concentrates
The provisions bite hardest where public officers exercise discretion over money and appointments. Evaluation committees, tender boards, and appointing authorities need declaration and recusal protocols embedded in the process itself, with the record captured at the point of decision. Retrospective reconstruction of who declared what, and when, is exactly the exercise that fails under investigation.
4. Donor conditionality has raised the cost of non-compliance
Because the regime sits inside the reform matrix of a major development policy operation, weak implementation is no longer contained within the institution that fails. It becomes a national disbursement issue. That reframes the calculus for every accounting officer: integrity compliance now carries fiscal consequences beyond the entity’s own audit.
5. Systems, not statements, are what the EACC can verify
A compliance report submitted in a prescribed template asks for facts: filings received, officers covered, gaps identified. Institutions with digital or well-maintained registers can produce those facts on demand. Institutions relying on policy documents and training records will find they have evidence of intent rather than evidence of compliance, and the template does not have a field for intent.
What This Means
For state corporations, commissions, and county governments. The immediate task is a compliance readiness review: who is covered, what has been filed, where the cycle stands, and who owns the register. Where gaps exist, remediation is cheaper before the next reporting cycle than after an EACC finding.
For boards and accounting officers. Declaration and recusal protocols belong inside the board charter, procurement procedures, and appointment processes, not in a standalone policy. The board’s own conflict register is the first document an investigator will ask for.
For private firms contracting with government. The regime reaches counterparties through restrictions on public officers’ interests and secondary engagements. Firms should expect declaration requirements in procurement processes and structure their own disclosure practices accordingly.
The Implications for ACAL’s Clients
Building institutional compliance architecture is established ACAL work. The firm has developed and certified management systems for national institutions, including the quality management system for Kenya’s national electricity transmission company and the information security management system for the national communications regulator, both requiring the documented processes, defined ownership, internal audit, and management review that a declaration regime also demands. Its governance and strategic planning practice has embedded compliance obligations into the operating documents of public institutions across sectors.
For public entities, the practical entry points are conflict of interest compliance readiness assessments, declaration register and workflow design, board and procurement protocol integration, and internal assurance frameworks that survive external verification.
Closing Perspective
Kenya has legislated one of the more demanding public sector integrity regimes on the continent, and it has attached both criminal penalties and donor conditionality to it. Whether that changes conduct depends on something less dramatic than the statute: whether institutions build the machinery to run it. A conflict of interest regime does not run on intent. It runs on registers, calendars, filing systems, and someone whose job it is to notice a missing declaration. Institutions that treat this as a policy statement will discover the difference at their first compliance report.
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
Strategic Insights That Drive Business Success
