Globally the post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional services, which vary by country. In Kenya such include money transfers.
For Kenya gone are the days when Kenyans used to transfer money through postal orders by filling out a form, paying cash to a teller, and receiving a money order. The sender would then mail the money order to the recipient, who would present it at a bank or paying office for payment. This process would take weeks and even months depending on the location of both the sender and the recipient.
I remember in the 1960s when to receive a postal order in Kimilili my father depended on a nearby institution with a post office box more than 30Km away in Bungoma and since there was no postal order paying facilities in Kimilili the hustle of receiving the postal order through someone else’s post box and then travelling the 30 km was unbearable and indeed risky.
Then something happened in 2007 in Kenya. M-PESA was launched and quickly captured a significant market share for cash transfers, and grew to 17 million subscribers by December 2011 in Kenya alone. By last year, 2024, Safaricom’s M-PESA is reported to have hit 34 Million Customers in Kenya. Considering that Kenya’s current estimated population is 56,000,000, of which 21, 000, 000 are the young who may be illegible to register a mobile phone line, then one could say the entire legible population is MPESA registered.
Entrepreneurs call this 2007 revolutionary happening as creative destruction. Creative destruction describes the deliberate dismantling of established processes in order to make way for improved methods of production. It is a concept that describes a process in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. For purposes of clarification, innovation is a product, service, business model, or strategy that is both novel and useful. One of the most important characteristics of an innovative idea is that it solves a problem.
Apart from the M-PESA revolution Kenya has witnessed many others including the digital revolution with the electronic mail, or ’email,’ emerging to replace the sending of letters through the post office to deliver messages. The National Bureau of Statistics revealed that in 2018 there were about 50,000 idle letter boxes around the country meaning that there has been their significant abandonment since then. This abandonment of post office boxes has continued and my own box lies idle currently and I have no intention of renewing it. This is courtesy the digital age which brought innovations such as e-mailing and social media platforms that enable me transfer information at the comfort of my bedroom.
In order to be part of the process of creative destruction I formed my first company in 2007 to become an MPESA agent. Registering my company involved adhering to specific legal and procedural requirements outlined under the then country’s Companies Act. Understanding these requirements was not a walk in the park for me so I had to hire the services of an advocate.
In 2014, the creative destruction wave led to the launching of an integrated e-Government services portal known as eCitizen to allow for online delivery of 41 services at pilot and accept payments for these services digitally through electronic card, electronic bank transfer and mobile money. Company registration was among the 41 services.
I am now retired after teaching entrepreneurship for 35+ years at university and I feel I am retired but neither tired nor expired. I see myself as wine that gets better with age. I therefore have decided to continue to teach my entrepreneurship through platforms like online radio and online TV. I chose the option of forming a new company for that purpose.
With the e-citizen platform revolution in place and available for me, I this time avoided registering my new company through the advocate route. However, along the process of the ecitizen online filling of the forms I encountered a compulsory requirement to fill my post office box. With the story of the post office boxes above, would this not jeopardize many who have moved on from the post office services. Could this requirement be made optional? Is it a way of forcing some people to keep post office boxes?
