From Huawei to Makmende

Last Tuesday was a roundabout day that began with the Equity Bank half year results announcement at and ended with Safaricom launch of a U8220 Android phone made by Huawei.

In between I shook hands with James Mwangi, Churchill dodged my paparazzi snap attempt, a friend of mine missed out on a free giveaway of the Huawei phone, and I missed out on buying some shares in Equity Bank as my stockbroker (temporarily) misplaced my funds.

At the Huawei launch, I had interesting chats with one pal on Kenol and another who found out an interesting tale about mobile spectrums – basically Kenyans should ignore mobile phone company promises and forget about 4G as its’ reserved for the Kenya military until further notice.

Huawei and Safaricom were jointly launching an android phone to the Kenyan market and since the Safaricom COO was late in traffic as per his boss, Michael Joseph the CEO stepped up and launched the phone on his behalf. The CEO seemed underwhelmed by the occasion, maybe because his retirement was about to be officially announced or maybe because it was because the Smartphone being unveiled would cost about Kshs 30,000 and was nowhere near the $100 (~Kshs 8,000) price for a smart phone which he has commented as being a key target for future data growth.

This ambivalence perhaps cascaded down because when Safaricom ran adverts for the new phone in the next day's paper , they were advertising a VF845 costing Kshs 16,500 ($206) and not the U8220, which had just been launched. The 'correct' ad for the U8220 then ran the following day pricing the phone at 27,200 (~$340)

Two days later, Bank of Africa formally opened their Ngong Road branch at Bishop Magua Center. This is their second branch opening this month after Nakuru and they have set out to go after the not for profit customers. They have launched a Goodwill Current Account with goodies for NGO's including waiver of monthly ledger fees, cheque book costs, (Kshs) withdrawal/deposits, internal transfers, incoming wires, banker’s cheques, interim statements and a minimum operating balance.

And finally on Friday, in the same building, the iHUb hosted a launch by Kuweni Serious (Get Serious) of a of a series of clips aimed at getting young Kenyans to participate in the constitutional referendum and in public life and starred Makmende.
Here’s one clip