Category Archives: Nation Media Group

The East African at 20

The EastAfrican newspaper is celebrating 20 years of circulation and publication around East Africa. The weekly from the Nation Media Group (NMG), is a favourite read, either online when stories go up over the weekend or on Monday in the office. On the occasion, we’ve learnt a bit about the newspaper which is distributed in all the East African countries. While, today, it may seem right in step for the times when regional economic integration in Eastern Africa is the central focus of many governments, trade, and political efforts, the newspaper was conceived at a time when Africa was still considered the dark continent.

We’ve learnt that it was the brain-child of the Nation Media Group’s principal shareholder, The Aga Khan who conceived of a newspaper that would promote regional integration. Writer Gerry Loughran recalls that as far back as 1970, the Aga Khan had expressed the wish for “at least one prestige publication of high quality circulating throughout East Africa”.

The choice of the title, omitting the “Nation’ was to de-emphasise the Kenyan-ness of the newspaper and the layout broke away from the successful look of other NMG papers and omitted a valuable front-page advertisement space. Others were the decision to make it a stand-alone weekly, and not a daily paper as that would require a lot of resources.

Among its first hires were two people who later became legends in their fields; the prolific Charles Onyango-Obbo who’s now the M&G Africa editor, and who still writes for the EastAfrican and the Nation and John Githongo who went on to lead Kenya’s anti-corruption efforts to their highest position before that all fell apart. The EastAfrican has had 7 managing editors including a lady, Pamela Sittoni.

Its launch was planned to coincide with the revival of the East African community and promote regional integration efforts. Indeed it told many positive stories of Rwanda post-1994.

That it has done and continues to this day. It’s the place you go to read long-form stories on different aspects of East African life. While most newspapers will still have Africa news buried within the single page devoted to world news, the EastAfrican leads and is full of stories that originate in any of the East African countries – whether its presidential term limits in Burundi, the Kwibuka20 events in Rwanda, the morphing of sea piracy into bush terror in Somalia, oil prospects in Uganda, a new brewery or railway in Ethiopia, the recycling peace talks of South Sudan, etc.

Amid all this is its coverage of business events. It’s probably the only newspaper that has had an analysis of the Crystal Telecom IPO in Rwanda in which all East African nationals will be able to buy 20% of MTN Rwanda. (Oops that closes today – when this post is published). They also have a healthy coverage of arts, travel diaries, literature, featuring pieces from Kwani and award-winning young African writeEast Africanrs.

The Nation Media Group AGM takes places today and the shareholders’ report notes that The EastAfrican newspaper had profit growth of 7% in 2014. Salute, to twenty more years.

Win #NationHela Cards

Prepaid cards are really useful these days as there’s so much you can buy on your phone or computer – such as purchases from app stores, online book stores and deal of the day sites. The best things about the cards like NationHela is that they only take money that you have, and send you an immediate alert on the remaining available balance by SMS. 

This is unlike with credit cards, which, if you’re not careful, your purchases will creep up and hit you with a surprise when you see the bill a few weeks later. Yes, a few purchases of $3.99 and $9.99 items won’t seem like much until you get a bill that is in Kshs ‘000 shillings.

NationHela has two cards to give away – each loaded with Kshs 2,000 (~$24). To win the first, leave a comment on what you think is the best feature of NationHela or a prepaid card, and for the second, leave a comment suggesting how NationHela can improve. 

Improving NationHela

Despite the ease of use, and convenience of Nation Hela as an online prepaid card and as a travel card, there are few challenges that need to be tweaked to improve the user experience for National Hela users.

Card Top Up 
The only reliable way of topping up the card is by physically going to a Diamond Trust Bank branch. Agents of the bank don’t handle NationHela top-up’s and surprisingly, Safaricom’s M-Pesa – which would be the ideal way for millions of Kenyans to load a card – does not work all the time. It’s a hit or miss experience, with many phone calls having to be made to Hela at Diamond Trust to trace the date/time/amount of the M-Pesa transfer – only for that to be reversed. 

Account Management
For now you can request for an abbreviated statement by SMS, as well as get an SMS each time you transact with the card in Kenya.  

There’s also the NationHela site, where a user should be able to view a history of transactions, and do other functions like block a stolen card. But access to the site remains a challenge – at first it looked like another bank site that only works on Internet Explorer browser and a Microsoft Windows PC combination, but no matter the device tablet, mac, or PC laptop, access to the site is a challenge – with password characters not visible, password changes not reflected, pop-up’s (that are auto-blocked on many browsers due to spam) etc. 
Easy of top-up and viewing transaction history are two essential user experience challenge points that need to be addressed, for the card to get wide acceptance.

Travelling with Nation Hela

Traveling with a NationHela has been a breeze. Unlike with bank credit cards where you have to call and notify them ahead to approve international charges that may be charged to the card, you don’t have to do that with NationHela – just top up the card and it’s ready to go. 

I used it to pay various bills in the Middle east including fast food meals, bar bills and gift purchases. The approvals were instant in all cases after swiping the card and receipts were printed  in whatever currency whether AED or US dollars. But one challenge is that, unlike in Kenya when you get an SMS each time you transact, that doesn’t happen when you’re roaming out of the country – and you don’t know how much you have used, and how much is left on the card. 

It would be nice if they could email this information to card users as an option. One is supposed to be able to view a statement via the Nation Hela website, but that’s not easily accessible yet. Having a full statement will make the card a truly useful global card to use for corporate travel, removing a headache at many companies of having to make imprest cash payment to staff ahead of travel, and reconciling the expenses after. 

With credit cards prone to fraud during international travel, there’s a move to promote and push prepaid cards and use them as an option to credit cards. Other cards in the market include multi-currency cards from I&M Bank and Nakumatt-ones powered by KCB and Diamond-Trust banks. 

Reactivating Nation Hela

The last few days have been spent trying to reconnect a Nation Hela card, that has been not much used since the launch just over a year ago.  The card was active, but the registration documents were never uploaded, rendering it inactive after a short period of usage. 
The issuance of cards, back office, registration, and payments are handled by Diamond Trust bank and their branches are the easiest way to obtain the cards, as well as load cash onto the prepaid card. For some reason, top ups with M-pesa don’t reflect for a few days.
The menu is also on one’s phone and can be accessed by checking *348#  and each use of the card is confirmed by an SMS to one’s phone.