Postal Corporation of Kenya (PCK) ( aka Posta for brevity sake) is one example of organisations in Kenya that have slept while opportunity and her sisters were knocking very loudly at the door. What do I mean?
Every family wishes to have a postal address rental box. I know for a fact that there is scarcity of new postal rental boxes and in some families, up to 3 generations are sharing one postal address as does extended families and whole neighbourhoods. Many SMEs also wish to have their own rental boxes, but demand by far outstrips supply. Bearing in mind the amount of space that a rental box takes, I cannot understand why Posta is not rolling out 10,000 per month! Every new shopping mall needs to have a subsidiary post office and you don't even need to take up expensive shop floors but a parking bay. Most of the expensive building are letting out their parking bays at between Kshs. 8,000 and 12,000 per month. One such bay can accommodate as many as 256 boxes at the front (assuming that its 8 x 8 ft) and the same number or more on one other side. With five hundred rental boxes from one parking bay, you don't have to be a genius to see how Posta can make loads of money.
Some say that they may be broke and don't have the 2 million needed to put up the structure- 500 locks, 1000 hinges, a door and metal casing for the boxes, but they can start a subsidiary separate from the debt-ridden mother ship and with long term credit, many Kenyans will be willing to pay the Kshs.4,000/- it will cost upfront or in installments of Kshs. 111/= per month for 3 years!
Many including Posta managers are always lamenting that Mobile telephony, internet and couriers may have taken over the express business and personal mails, but there is opportunity in traditional mail like shares, dividend, land registry correspondence, school certificates, etc I don't ever see registered mail being transmitted through text messages or emails. We all want to touch and feel the real thing. Isn't that opportunity for Posta to work with the conveyors of such documents. It is called captive market!
For any serious transformation of the Posta to happen, they have to move their thinking away from the traditional Post Office set up. The colonial era post office will not do. Posta needs to outsource. They need to learn from the banking industry's agencies or the M-pesa agency model. I know being a parastatal, there are a thousand and one reasons why its not "doable". The biggest reason is that no other parastatal has done it before! With the recent enactment of the Public Private Partnership Act, I believe this is another opportunity waiting for a taker. So the model of post offices have to move away from the tradition.
The agency model can also see Posta utilize the home delivery model which naysayers may wish to say is an anti-thesis of the traditional rental box model! If you have devolved postal agencies some of the local agencies will deliver to homes of their customers. The same can be done for slums and poor sectors of society where one box can be shared by up to 20 families with the agency owner managing the mails received via a register. For a small fee, he will deliver your mail to your home.
Kenya has not been left behind in the E-commerce & Online trade front. Many intra-city business are using the online platform to showcase their products and services. The trade is facilitated by plastic money, mobile money and cash on delivery. In my view Posta needs to get into the game and facilitate delivery via postal boxes. With increased efficiency, every purchase should be in the buyers post office within 48 hours (after all even long-service buses and matatus are "couriering" tonnes of goods across the country overnight).
Posta can also take advantage of the failure by physical address system project which would have seen the city gradually move to the delivery of mails going physical to homes and offices. Unfortunately since 2006 when the idea was mooted as part of the Afri-Cities beautification programme, not much has happened and no one has bothered link it to some use beyond security and assisting visitors find an address. The project has not worked and may not work because City Council as the implementer lacks credibility. Posta needs to go out and grab that project and own it. For the whole country to go physical address system, it will be another 30 years and since one of the benefits of the system is quick delivery to final addresses of mail, Posta has the biggest stake and interest in the project.
It is also possible that Posta could complement courier services by offering post offices as dropping zones with a requirement that out of town mails will be channeled through its system. Win-win situation they call it. Allocate the various couriers desk space in the various Posta banking halls and demand a minimum amount of business per day from the couriers. Turn your perceived competitors into a complementing opportunity.
All these opportunities may need the management and board of directors to shed away all the organisation's history gathered over 100 years that the organisation has existed in different forms. They also have to operate like the box did not exist. It is not enough to think outside the box- imagine there was no box at all! Do not take study tours abroad to study other countries, come up with a home-grown solution. One for Kenya. M-pesa has failed to click anywhere outside Kenya. Think local solutions to our local unique and peculiar problems.
We are watching.
