HDP, Kafka, LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE

Problem
After HDP cluster kerberization, the Kafka does not work even though Kafka Healthcheck passes green. Any execution of kafka-console-producer.sh ends up with the error message: /usr/hdp/3.1.0.0-78/kafka/bin/kafka-console-producer.sh --broker-list kafka-host:6667 --producer-property security.protocol=SASL_PLAINTEXT --topic xxx

WARN [Producer clientId=console-producer] Error while fetching metadata with correlation id 1 : {xxxx=LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE} (org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient)
WARN [Producer clientId=console-producer] Error while fetching metadata with correlation id 2 : {xxxx=LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE} (org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient)
WARN [Producer clientId=console-producer] Error while fetching metadata with correlation id 3 : {xxxx=LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE} (org.apache.kafka.clients.NetworkClient)
kafka-topics.sh reports that the leader is not assigned to the partition.
/usr/hdp/3.1.0.0-78/kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh -zookeeper zookeeper-host:2181 --describe xxx --unavailable-partitions

Topic: ambari_kafka_service_check Partition: 0 Leader: 1001 Replicas: 1001 Isr: 1001
Topic: identity Partition: 0 Leader: none Replicas: 1002 Isr:
Topic: xxx Partition: 0 Leader: none Replicas: 1002 Isr:
Topic: xxxx Partition: 0 Leader: none Replicas: 1002 Isr:

There is nothing special in Kafka /var/log/kafka/server.log file. Only /var/log/kafka/controller.log suggests that something went wrong: cat controller.log

INFO [ControllerEventThread controllerId=1002] Starting (kafka.controller.ControllerEventManager$ControllerEventThread)
ERROR [ControllerEventThread controllerId=1002] Error processing event Startup (kafka.controller.ControllerEventManager$ControllerEventThread)
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonFactory.createParser(JsonFactory.java:857)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper.readTree(ObjectMapper.java:2571)
at kafka.utils.Json$.parseBytes(Json.scala:62)
at kafka.zk.ControllerZNode$.decode(ZkData.scala:56)
at kafka.zk.KafkaZkClient.getControllerId(KafkaZkClient.scala:902)
at kafka.controller.KafkaController.kafka$controller$KafkaController$$elect(KafkaController.scala:1199)

Solution
Uncle Google brings back many entries related to LEADER_NOT_AVAILABLE error but none of them led to the solution. Finally, I found this entry.
So the healing is very simple.

• Stop Kafka
• Run zkCli.sh Zookeeper command line
• Remove /controller znode, rmr /controller
• Start Kafka again

The evil spell is defeated.