Thursday, August 02, 2007

two sides of the kenyan coin

This morning i had a rather interesting encounter at the posta sarit. first, i thought they opened at 8:30; well i gave them the benefit of being a state corporation. when i went, i found that they actually open at 9:00. (truly i never knew in this day and age there are still people who start work at 9:00) with this booming economy why cant u take the advantage and catch customers early. anyway so i hovered around, waiting for time, i even went upstairs to uchumi to browse. i saw a nice collection of old Kenyan music of the likes of kaikai kilonzo, goerge omolo, Guta Lie Bobo, Baraka Mwinshehe etc. i am told this collection is there courtesy of Mr. Makali. the CDs are going for quite a good price. the most being only 800 bob. well then i got back to posta and noticed it was only remaining 2 minutes to nine however the cleaner walked out of the door and left it slightly open and i went in. to my shock and horror the employees shouted at me to go back out since it was not yet time! i adamantly ignored them and went straight to posta pay. after filling the form and waiting for the 2 minutes (the lady refused to look at her computer only pointing at the old clock hang on the wall) when she finally did, she discovered the software wasn't working. tried several times an even restarted the machine to no avail. so i wasted all that time waiting for a service which was down! i wish they had used the waiting time to make sure all their equipment was in order!!!!

but on the other side of the coin, other Kenyans are maximizing on the boom, nakumatt holding have opened the first ever 24/7 shopping mall in kenya. the convenience! and more things from nakumatt and equity now you can withdraw your cash from a nakumat till if you are an equity customer. the only thing is the the riders are rather confusing. you can only withdraw 10,000 if your shopping was worth 1000 and so on.

Meanwhile, kenyans are ahead of others and are wondering how safaricom will hold their AGMs. i suggest they set up a 0900 number where shareholders can call up and listen to deliberations. if you want to vote for Mr. X press 1 else press 2 . how about that?

the price of safaricom shares? will definitely depend on how many. if they decide to issue 4b shares then it will be about 9 /= per share and they may go the route of Kenya Re and insist on batches of say 1000 or even 10,000.

5 comments:

  1. Sorry about the Posta encounter. By the way most government offices open at 9.00 am and they leave as early as they can even as early as 3.30 pm. I was at immigration today in the morning and after waiting for what seemed like eternity they told me my passport is still in the 'store'. I applied for it on 21 June and they assured me it will only take 21 working days. Even if my counting is wrong 21 working days are over.

    Nakumatt is doing some serious reorganizing and expansion. 1st they partnered with Equity, and then they opened their Rwandan branch and now a 24 hours shopping. Kudos to them!

    Safaricom will be headache, whether they like it or not. But I thing it will all depend on the pricing and allocation. Most likely they will go the Access Kenya way, with a very retail unfriendly minimum application.

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  2. In this parts of the world (benelux)diiaspora belgium-netherlands-luxembourg offices open at 0900hrs and the good i like about the people is the culture of queing. Hardly ever will anyone jump the line not unless you are about to miss an international train but people are courteous. On the other side of the coin 90% still have a bad taste on their mouth regarding people from Africa except the policemen who are very nice people

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  3. In this day and age of customer care, I'm shocked by that old school mentality. It's time to move to Mpesa, Odegs, your phone won't shout back that it isn't 9 am yet!

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  4. Safaricom is a public entity...taxpayers...and should not go the unfriendly Access Kenya allocation way. AGM headaches is a fact they will have to learn to live with. However, they need not print heaps annual reports. All they need to do is ask for email addresses during the application process and send the reports as email attachments. They will save tons of money this way. If this is not lawful, amend the damn law...we are almost past the information age.

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  5. @ka-investor, sorry about the passport but i heard it was meant to take just a few days these days?

    @anon,tuff being in africa, but am one of the pple who believe that a little goes a long way

    @mwasjd, i have used mpesa a number of times. a great product however the service is yet to reach my shags so i can only use postapay to send money that side

    @anon, agreed but how will they hold AGMs?

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