AFRINIC Eddy Kayihura bids farewell to AFRINIC as its Chief Executive Officer

The impact of the legal cases against AFRINIC has made it such, that today AFRINIC has neither a properly constituted Board of Directors nor a Chief Executive Officer.

Ish Sookun

1 min read

Last night, at 23h26 MUT, Eddy Kayihura wrote to the AFRINIC Members Discuss mailing list. The subject of the email was "AFRINIC Update Nov 2022", a subject often used when Eddy provides monthly updates about the organisation. However, in this email the update was about his end of contract with AFRINIC on 3 November 2022.

At the moment, AFRINIC does not have a properly constituted Board of Directors and it cannot just organise an election to fix the same. Therefore, there is currently no authority that could have renewed Eddy's employment contract with AFRINIC. Such could only be done through a Board resolution. When Eddy's contract expired at midnight on 4 November 2022, it meant the end of journey for him as the CEO of AFRINIC.

In his email, Eddy mentioned that during his time at AFRINIC, he had to take bold and difficult decisions. While he won't be around to oversee the end-results of those decisions, he wished that the future leadership of AFRINIC takes good care of the staff, as they stood honourably protecting the interests of community members.

Lastly, Eddy said that he will remain a committed member of the African community to help AFRINIC in the next steps.

The last sentence makes me ponder what do those mean — next steps of AFRINIC.

Thank you for serving AFRINIC with all your heart, Eddy.