“You will die,” I told my friend.
I was being dramatic. He knew I was referring to his employer, the then Kenya Posts & Telecommunications Corporation, after an unsuccessful attempt to convince my friend to establish a national call centre to aggregate service requests (for more efficient resolution) and to more widely avail the novel mobile telephony service that they then only allowed to a very privileged few, at exorbitant subscription charges.
I was a star victim of their poor service and inconsistent, even fraudulent billing practices. As a technical services manager, I had to take the heat from our seething staff when there were delays in resolving faults. At one time I had even been threatened by my employer with firing, after we had to wait for the better part of a year for addittional telephone lines that I wouldn’t bribe for.
Later, in my own business, I had to sell modems (installed in computers) without the then required type-approval licence due to corruption demands that I wouldn’t comply with. It was not illegal to sell; the law forbid use, I argued. But they were on me nearly every day.
Needless to say my conversation with my friend, a very senior official at KPTC, and who I believed had the power to act as I was suggesting, went nowhere. Bureaucracy.
“We are too big; a monopoly,” he told me.
Fast, fast forward… to 2002. I was heading an IT team responsible for the back end systems integration at KenCel (today, Airtel), the second company to be granted a licence to rollout mobile phone services. We had just hit 600,000 subscribers, overtaking Safaricom’s subscriber base, which status was reversed not long after when the company changed hands and Michael Joseph introduced game changing strategies at Safaricom. But on that day, celebrations were in order.
In time KPTC died, largely; ending up being sold off at a pittance as Telkom, a struggling trailer, currently with a 4.9% market share of the telecoms market, behind the babies that rode on their foreunner’s indolence and impunity in the not so distant past.
A few years on, I found myself predicting again of the deaths of the supermarkets that ruled the retail market. During our transition from developing ICT systems for blue chip firms to partnering with small scale farmers to create and consolidate shareable value from their labour we had created a honey brand and gotten it into supermarket shelves. We had gotten small scale farmers to grow high value vegetables and packaged them for sale through supermarkets…. But alas, we couldn’t keep our shelf spaces — Each time we were thrown off after a manager solicited bribes and we said, “No, we are Christians. We don’t pay bribes.
“They will die,” I said with conviction one time to my frustrated members of staff. “There is no way a solid retail chain can be built on a corrupt foundation. They will lose all honest suppliers. They will stock fake goods. They will get robbed by their corrupt staff.”
The rest is history, as they say. As many as nearly all those giants came tumbling down. Those surviving to date now maintain a tiny segment of the retail market — most of it now in the control of foreigners.
And then there was Posta, the post office division that had been hived off KPTC. One day in the near-death days of the erstwhile postal giant I reminisced with a friend who still had high level connections in the organisation, remembering a suggestion I had made to them in the early days of the internet (mid 90s) for the organisation to sell email subscription addresses anchored on their post office box subscribers (yourpostofficeboxnumber@posta.co.ke) and offer printing services for the messages to be slotted in the subscribers’ mail boxes.
“You were too far ahead,” my friend rationalised.
“No,” I said. “I was desperate. Frustrated.” I had tried in vain to obtain a post office box. Corruption stood in the way. I ended up “borrowing” the use a mailbox from a friend, at great inconvenience to him.
Fast, fast, fast forward again to today, and here I am again, making my now famous prediction: this time to Kenya Power & Lighting Company.
“You will die,” I say boldly in my frustration and anger. A KPLC “broker” had asked me for a bribe in order to go “push” an application I made for installation of electricity at our cookstove production facility.
My prediction is informed, though, to cite only one area of progress: In recent years, there have been incredible developments in solar technologies that have greatly improved their efficiency and reduced their costs, making them increasingly competitive with traditional sources of electrical power. There are other promising technologies.
To mitigate KPLC’s delays in restoring services after interruptions I have been installing back up power. I am about half-way through the transition from KPLC’s servanthood to the independence of off-grid
Solar. My 1,000W system covers lights, computers, two fridges and all other little devices. My goal is to be fully liberated by year end, after I install a much bigger inverter and enough batteries to support the remaining gadgets, the biggest being a washing machine and a 3000w printer. Then I will get a solar water heater. And I will sing “Bye! KPLC”. Hopefully by this year end.
For now, when I call their call centre I engage them in wordplay:
“Oh, please,” I say, “might you have an idea who else I could call other than KPLC for a decent service?”
“We will fix the problem,” I am told.
“But you have not fixed it for three days now,” I insist, to stirr up a sense of urgency in them.
“Our maintenance crew will attend to the fault,” I am “assured”.
“Aah,” I say, like an explorer who has just made an increfible discovery, “There isn’t anyone else! You are a monopoly.”
“The crew will come,” I am told.
I have no idea when! they don’t care when. Only one thing is clear: KPLC will die. When? In time!
If you enjoyed the above read, here’s another one you might find interesting, also exploring the same theme on corruption: Reaping What We Sow – In Corruption
Haron Wachira 