Category Archives: Econet

Weekend Wrap

Non-performers
This week our Members of Parliament were ranked by a lobby group and came out as having performed very poorly. Even though they condemned the survey, most Kenyans feel the results are true – but all want to get a ticket of their own to Parliament next time round.

MP for Hire?
The top ranked MP in the survey, Kitutu Chache MP Jimmy Angwenyi was caught on Nation TV in a highly suspicious tea break with disgraced officials of the Ministry of Health causing him not to ask a sensitive question in Parliament. Last week he kept lobbing soft balls until Information Minister Raphael Tuju to hit a home run against Econet Wireless.

Transparency International moves on
On Friday April 29th, TI advertised the vacant post of executive director. Applicants must be Kenyans citizens of integrity who can demonstrate project development, fund-raising, local & international interface skills as well as recruit, manage and motivate other TI staff. Apply to recruit@adeptsystems.co.ke by 13th May.

Plant A Tree
Today (Friday) is national tree planting – unfortunately, no one noticed and Kenya’s forests are being rapidly depleted. Since the entire Nyayo era is being revived by Narc, I‘d like to encourage them to re-introduce Moi’s 1980 tree project of “kata moja, panda mbili” to encourage tree planting among rural communities who depend on firewood for fuel

Upcoming Debate
On Tuesday May 3rd (6.p.m) at the Stanly Hotel, the Media Council of Kenya has arranged a forum entitled “Is the media abusing freedom of the press?” Members of the public are invited to share their views with Standard Associate Editor Kwamchetsi Makokha and Public Communication Secretary, Dr. Alfred Mutua, among others.

Prosecutors scoring zero
As Tom Delamere entered the court system to be charged with murder, out walked three suspects who had been charged with killing Professor Mbai last year (yes they are innocent, but who are the real killers? Also walking out of jail this week was Ketan Somaia, following in the golden footsteps of Kamlesh Pattni who was acquited last month. And even as Kenyans this week discovered how rotten the National Aids Control Council was, former director Dr. Gachara is sitting at home, courtesy of a Presidential pardon last Jamhuri Day. With a high-powered legal team (led by Fred Ojiambo) already assembled against a Nakuru prosecutor, Delamare’s ordeal will be over in a few months.

What is Econet?

Information & Communications Minister Raphael Tuju came out with both guns blazing from behind the safety of Parliament immunity and basically called Econet a snake oil sales company or the equivalent of Anglo-Leasing (a ghost) incapable of setting up a mobile phone network in Kenya.

What Impact will Econet have on Kenya? Here is a breakdown of the products and services that they offer in Zimbabwe (1 Kenya shilling = 80 Zimbabwe dollars – and all prices have already been converted)[info from their web site]

Products
Buddie: instant pre paid mobile phone connection from Econet wireless. With Buddie, you get NO hassles, NO credit checks, NO subscriptions, NO monthly bills and of course, an instant connection. Buddie is affordable because it offers you total control over your cell phone usage. It’s up to you how much you want to spend.

Sounds like a typical pre-paid Safaricom or Celtel number so far. So what’s different? You can have a buddy inner circle, which consists of five other Econet numbers of your friends/relatives – and you get 20% savings on each call. Initial Registration is free, subsequent change of numbers will cost 60 shillings
IMHO savings offered by Econet should be more – maybe even up to 50%. Within Safaricom, on a given day, once caller may pay 32 shillings per minute (with Tarific) to call safaricom, while another customer pays 16 shillings (Jambo tariff) –NOTE Celtel already has a package like this for corporate customers who can call select Celtel numbers at discounted rates

Libertie: Flexible service that offers value added services – customers have a choice and can select a package that is convenient and affordable for them, as each package has a different tariff and method of payment. Typical post-paid service as from Safaricom and Celtel Different top ups: With Libertie lines you can only use the subscription or top up vouchers to top up your account and not the Buddie recharge cards. Top up denominations are 250, 500 750 1,000 and 1,500 shillings and you can top up to 25,000 shillings. Any airtime that is not used by the end of the month is carried forward to the next month – and at the end of your 30 days, if you have not paid the next month’s subscription you will be barred from making calls even if you still have money in the account.

Business Partna: Contract package designed for corporate organizations, and gives the customer the real advantage of a wide range of value-added services. It includes unlimited access to airtime, access to mobile e-mail (send and receive e-mails on your cell phones at the cost of an SMS), access to mobile bill enquiries, electronic bills (receive your bill statement via e-mail).

Txt – Short Message Service: Short Message Service (SMS) including Txt – Classifieds (place classified advertising in newspapers via SMS), Txt n’ Score (predict the score of a particular soccer match and stand to win airtime prizes), Txt – Ring tones, Logo’s and Picture messages (provides subscribers with ring tones, logos and picture messages). There is no charge for receiving an SMS from another subscriber. To send an ordinary TXT costs only 2.5 shillings or 12.5 shillings for a ring tone, logo or picture message. already available in Kenya from both mobile companies

Services
Roaming: Use your Econet SIM card whenever you cross borders by connecting to our roaming service – no need to worry about paying your bill in foreign currency for any calls you make while away from home as you will pay when you return from travel. But you must notify Econet a week before travel and a refundable deposit may be required already available to some Safaricom subscribers – they even have a special Traveller tariff

Crisis Centre (Emergency Services) Econet mans a 24-hour emergency service centre in the country and you have automatic access to the Fire Brigade, Ambulance, Police, Safeguard and Rescue services on your fingertips. sounds like Safaricom’s 911 service, but no idea if its free for all – which it should be

Ecomail (Voice mail)
A personal answering service that works for you 24 hours a day. Kenyans rarely use voicemail, preferring to send SMS messages which are cheaper (5 shillings as opposed to a full minute charged for leaving voice mail) and clearer

Call Centre
Econet runs a 24-hour Call Centre that gives advice, directory services, and information to subscribers on products and services. nothing to brag about

Value Added Services
Executive Briefing: This is a value added service available only to contract subscribers. It is SMS based and provides wide range of information ranging from local news to international news. Charges per month are News (63 shillings), Sport (63 sh), Business news (38 sh) ZSE – stock exchange (38 sh) Weather Report (25 sh) or all the above services for 190 shillings per month. Included FREE are a daily inspirational quote, bible verse and breaking news. Safaricom offers these services to all subscribers at 7 shillings per message

News on Demand
Allow subscribers to listen to the latest local, regional and international news through their Econet lines not viable as Kenyans always turn on TV’s at news time

Electronic Bills
Subscribers can receive account invoices electronically instead of having to wait for the post office to deliver. Something Celtel should introduce. this is a good idea, even Celtel should do this, but it’s only for post-paid customers

Corporate Brief’s

Barclays
The whole saga of the Matiba schools vs. Barclays is spinning out of control. Current MP’s and former MP’s have stepped up and urged the government to tame rogue foreign banks that are destroying Kenya entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, over the weekend, threats were made to Barclays and staff working for the receiver manager of the schools. Hopefully these are just prank calls.

HFCK
Al is well or not well with Housing Finance’s proposed merger with Development bank (DBK) .It appears that, not only is DBK management opposed to the deal, but also Central Bank of Kenya which now also wants to remove the managers of HFCK

Central Bank
Meanwhile deputy governor Sambili’s term is coming to an end. The office comes with security of tenure.

Econet
According to Ministry of Information PS, James Rege, Econet will not be allowed to operate in Kenya because it has only paid $15 million of the $27 million license fee. This was on KTN, but after attending a few functions and seeing some wild news coverage, I’d like to see the actual remarks, and the context in which he made them.

Telkom
Telkom will lay off 12,000 of its 18,000 workers. This will save 400 million shillings a month – Telkom earns 1.2 billion shillings a month, but half of that goes to salaries (according to media reports on Monday). The company has about 250,000 lines, and according to PS Rege, a Senegalese telephone operator serves the same number of lines with just 2,000 employees.

Econet Wants You

Freed (for now) by the Kenyan Court system, Econet Wireless is wasting no time and has gone ahead and advertised for jobs in the Nation and Standard virtually every day of the week:

They invited applicants for network engineers – 6 jobs (Friday April 1) transmission engineers – 19 jobs (Sunday April 3 newspapers), sales & marketing – 17 and information systems – 12 (April 5), and customer service – 13 and interconnect & international 6 jobs (April 6).

Business Briefs

Econet Licence Good: Econet is Back (for now at least) on track – But I won’t believe it till I see the launch, and a kiosk selling Econet airtime.

KRA is no IRS: The Kenya Revenue Authority is unable to pay 2.2 billion in VAT refunds it owes to corporations. They blame the Minister (Treasury) for giving away too many incentives and waivers.

Daima Bank: Depositors and Creditors of Daima Bank are invited to a meeting at 680 Hotel on 4th March at 10 a.m. where they will be given an update on attempts to revive the Bank that is now under statutory management by CBK.

Serena Profits: In a sign of the recovery in the tourism sector, Tourism Promotion Services (the Serena Hotels Group) announced a 420% increase in profits – from 25m in 03 to Kshs. 130 million in 2004.

Media: After reviving True Love and Drum Magazines, the Nation Media Group will now also revive the Weekly Review after taking over the name from Hillary Ng’weno.

Meanwhile, the Standard will launch a Coast magazine pullout in its Thursday paper, starting tomorrow, to compete against the Nation’s Coast Express which is published on Friday’s (as a separate weekly newspaper).

Supermarkets: Uchumi plans to do a share rights issue (similar to KCB in 04) in June 2005 to raise Kshs. 750 million.

Meanwhile, Nakumatt management confirmed plans to open 2 stores every year.

Airlines: An Official of Miami Dade Aviation wrote a letter to the Standard to clarify that (i) their recent visit to Kenya was to assist JKIA upgrade from a category II to Category I status which would enable direct flight to America, and also to promote a trade conference which will take place in the US later this year (ii) denied that they (Miami) had insisted that KLM/KQ alliance be dissolved (iii) confirmed that there were no plans yet for KQ to fly to Miami, at this stage, they have only presented a proposal to the KQ MD

Meanwhile Al-Etihad Airlines will fly from Abu-Dhabi to Nairobi.