This weekend I was sifting through my old letters and I found a letter I received from my wife dated December 5th, 2005. Then, we had just known each other for two years and we were still dating. Mobile telephony had not yet penetrated in the village and our main form of communication was letters. The good old days yea?...but then what is good about remembering the days when communication was such a hustle?.....
How did we even survive those days? Anyway, this memory kind of made me remember back in the day when Kenya Posta Corporation was a big deal. Its employees were the best paid, it was the only company in Kenya that could deliver your mail. You paid whatever amount they asked for and even asked if they could take more to have your application letter delivered via speed post. The employees were often rude and sometimes uncouth.…”if only there was an alternative.” We would tell ourselves. Then in the early 2000s, our prayers were answered and mobile telephony companies came. The companies grew so fast and soon everyone could afford a phone. Sending letters became less a means of communication between friends and family. Around the same time, bus companies started offering courier services, delivering urgent letters in matters of hours and soon no one needed speed post and telegrams.
The last time I heard of Posta corporation of Kenya, they were ‘restructuring’; a polite word for ‘mass firings.’ Pundits believe that one of the reasons postal corporation of Kenya went down was their refusal to read the signs of time and change with the tide of change. There are rumors that they even passed deals to merge with new mobile telephony companies and wanted to keep things as they believed that they had a firm grip on their market share.
Someone once said that change is the only permanent thing in life. Change is always inevitable and it happens regardless of how hard we try to stop it. The only way to bit change is to change in its face. The uncompromising and rigid way of thinking and traditionalism are the fastest ways to strangle yourself to death in a fast changing environment. Embrace change.
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