The outrage of shopping with nothing but your phone, on a day of M-Pesa outage

Widespread service outage disrupted M-pesa-related transactions on January 9, 2023. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]

I was out and about early in the week, like most Kenyans, doing some shopping while armed with nothing but my phone.

Fortunately for me, I was in a locality where I know most traders by name, so they trusted that I’d pay for the goods offered when the Safaricom system was restored.

For the record, I picked two pesticides from an agrovet to deal with cutworms that have desecrated my lawns with malicious intent.

I had tried other natural methods like luring the birds to the grass, in the hope that the birds would spot the worms and peck at them, but it was too cold for the birds to come out and play.

Anyhow, the pesticides secured, I hadn’t got home before the calls from the agrovet started raining.

For some reason, I didn’t hear the first or second call, but I heard the third call, which I chose to ignore. I mean, just because I owe you a thousand bob or two, my phone does not become yours to use and abuse.

I think the agrovet, too, got the message and paused for a while. But the calls resumed soon after, accompanied by text notifications indicating the Pay Bill number and the amount due. The thing is, I have purchased items worth a lot more from the same shop and I’m normally in no rush to pick them. But now the equation had changed, the shopkeeper was running out of breath with worry.

I hope Safaricom will learn to upgrade their systems at night time, not daytime, and spare us such pecuniary embarrassment.