THE MOBILE PHONE REVOLUTION IN KENYA, IN THE EYES OF A MILLENNIAL.

 

 

THE MOBILE PHONE REVOLUTION IN KENYA, IN THE EYES OF A MILLENNIAL

 

As a millennial I can appreciate how far we have come as a society, the mobile phones literally revolutionalised & transformed life as we knew it, we can barely recognize it !.

The life we live today is nothing compared to what it was in the 1990s & early 2000s (specifically 1995 to 2005).

Take high school life for example, for our parents back then to communicate with us, they had to write letters & send them via post, this took around two weeks for us to know what is going on at home. For them to send us pocket money, the fastest way was through the telegraphic money order which would take around 3 days (that is if the local post office had sold enough stamps to raise the required amount).  To alert your parents of an emergency or a change in the school closure dates, we had to make do with telegrams, each word being counted & paid for.

The same text message (SMS) that one dispatches today in seconds would have costed a fortune back then if you sought to send the message via telegram & each word charged.

I remember one day we went on strike, we stoned the teachers’ quarters overnight !. The next day we were ordered out of the school by police. For those of us from Nairobi, we had to go beg the same teachers we were stoning for busfare !  There was no way we would have sent telegrams to our parents and then awaited the telegraphic money orders, this would have taken well over a week.

Gen Zs of nowadays have MPESA and it would take them seconds to be sorted. We enjoyed no such luxury.  

In the dating scene we had to contend with agreeing on meeting places way ahead of time, these were Afya Center, Kencom chini ya saa & Bus Station chini ya saa etc

Nowadays Gen Zs can even track each other’s movement in real time via uber apps.

What is today taken for granted as normal life by Gen Zs & Gen Alphas is more than a dream come true for some of us. 

Job hunting on its part was a real nightmare

In the past access to a CEO or any other “big man” was through his usually harsh & dismissive secretary or his uncooperative security guard at the company gate.  The written warnings at the gate were clear, HAKUNA KAZI – MBWA KALI.

Even if you dared get in you would rarely get past the secretaries, they would forensically interrogate you and your mission there before dismissing you.

This cant apply today as in most cases you will have directly communicated with the “big man” on his phone and he would be expecting you. You can even text him once you encounter difficulty at the reception. Back then many of us got turned away at the gates or by the receptionists.

Nowadays you can even use Facebook or Twitter to catch the eye of a CEO via his inbox & secure an appointment.

Life as we know it today was nothing like it was back then.

MPESA is indeed a game changer, in campus my father would send me money via courier! (G4S & WellsFargo) disguised as a letter.   Later on, when Equity opened, even 500/= would be deposited from Mombasa for me to withdraw in Nairobi.

Before Equity, opening a bank account was no joke, Cooperative Bank which was a more friendly bank those days still required that you had a referee, who had to state how many years they had known you, the referee was someone who already had an account there.

MPESA that came in 2007 thus did away with all these bureaucracies.

Without MPESA back then, the only memorable thing is that incidences of ladies “kula fare” were unheard of.