Staff Photographer
They say that when Kenya sneezes (economically, that is), the rest of the Eastern African region catches a cold. The post-election violence at the beginning of 2008 sent Uganda and Rwanda, for example, into a panic.
They are both landlocked and depend on Kenya’s port at Mombasa for commodities such as oil. For three months everything was at a standstill in Kenya. Prices of what was soon a rare commodity, oil, skyrocketed and with that inflation shot up. But a year later, life has returned to normal.
There’s one area, however, in which we’re only now playing catch up — mobile telephony.
For the longest time mobile phones were for the rich only. Back then there was just one company offering mobile phone services. Subscribers even had to pay to receive calls. A joke did the rounds that in Uganda hawkers sitting a few metres from one another in a Kampala market could afford to make cheap calls to one another to find out who had tomatoes to spare. While Kenyans wallowed in a communication blackout, mobile phones were commonplace next door.
Then a second company (first called Kencell, then Celtel, now Zain and still counting the name changes) arrived on the scene. Mobile phones got cheaper. Those who acquired them needed to make a statement. Real show-offs would walk into a bar and order an extra glass for their phones to sit in on the counter top. People in meetings would place their handsets on the table for all to see.
Not long ago, just before it changed into Zain, Celtel started to offer irresistible deals. Their lines became a must-buy if one was with the only other competitor, Safaricom. With a new line came the need for a second phone, which many people bought.
Now Kenya has a cool four mobile phone operators. The additional two have landed with flashy names — Orange and Yu. Imagine telling someone “I’m on Yu” as a way of announcing your preferred mobile telephony option. Depending on what they hear, that statement can be misconstrued, no?
Anyway, I’m watching this space, waiting to see who will buy up to four handsets as homes for all possible SIM cards to get the best of four worlds. Orange is offering calls for as little as 0,01 dollars for five preferred numbers. Yu is topping up lines when its subscribers receive calls of up to 10 minutes from another network.
Me, I’ll stop at two phones, thank you. There’s only so far one can go in pursuit of good deals. Still, for many the four-phones option may cause bars to have to buy extra glasses to display the expected proliferation of mobile handsets.
Nyokabi Baiya is a freelance writer based in Nairobi