Kenya Airways has a new acting chief executive for the second time in nine months. Habil Waswani, the airline’s company secretary and director of legal services, takes over as acting Group Managing Director and CEO on September 15, replacing Captain George Kamal, who resigned for personal reasons.
The announcement, signed by board chairman Kiprono Kittony and dated September 1, follows a pattern that has now repeated twice inside a year: Kenya Airways loses a chief executive, then hands the seat to whoever already sits closest to the boardroom rather than launching an outside search first.
A short tenure ends
Kamal took the acting CEO role on December 16, 2025, stepping up from Chief Operating Officer after Allan Kilavuka’s departure. He leaves after roughly nine months in the top job. Kenya Airways credits him with stabilising operations during his three years as COO and with leading the executive team through the airline’s ongoing turnaround programme, including a return to profit in early 2025 for the first time in eleven years.
Kamal will stay on for a 30 day transition before formally leaving the airline on September 30. The board thanked him for his service without detailing what the personal reasons behind his exit involve, leaving that question open for now.
Who is taking over
Waswani is not new to Kenya Airways. He has run the airline’s legal, risk and compliance functions since March 2021 and also oversees company secretarial duties covering board and shareholder matters. Before that, he spent seven years at National Bank of Kenya as director of legal services and company secretary, a stretch that included leading the legal work behind KCB Group’s 2019 takeover of the bank. Earlier stops include Kenya Reinsurance Corporation and Diamond Trust Bank, giving him close to a quarter century in corporate and commercial law across banking, insurance and now aviation.
He holds a law degree from the University of Nairobi, a diploma from the Kenya School of Law, and a Global Executive MBA run jointly by United States International University and Columbia Business School in New York. The Legal 500 named him to its GC Powerlist for East Africa for three straight years, 2024 through 2026.
Kittony framed the appointment as continuity rather than change in direction. “
The Board fully supports the appointment of Mr. Waswani as he takes over the organisation’s executive leadership during this interim period,” he said, adding that the carrier’s turnaround strategy still has the full backing of shareholders.
What KQ is really solving for
A lawyer running an airline is not unusual on paper. Company secretaries often sit closest to the board and know the governance terrain better than anyone outside the C-suite. What stands out here is frequency: Kenya Airways has changed its top executive twice since December, both times promoting from inside rather than pausing for an external hire, even as it says a competitive search for a permanent CEO is already underway.
That search now carries more weight than the title suggests. Kenya Airways is still working to convert its 2025 return to profit into a repeatable result, still trying to rebuild fleet capacity after Boeing 787 groundings, and still hunting for a strategic investor to shore up its balance sheet.
Waswani steps into that workload with strong legal credentials and no public record running airline operations. How long the board leaves him there, and whether the next name announced comes from outside the building, will say more about the state of Kenya Airways than this announcement does on its own.
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