For ICT, it’s been a long journey since 2000

There’s nothing like the close of a decade to evoke long -forgotten memories.

It was in 2000 that this journalist, the first time, ventured out to cover a story on the emerging ICT field.

An early memory involves a bunch of journalists standing in the windy parking lot along Mombasa Road — there were a lot fewer buildings back then to break the wind — watching as a shocking pink logo and catchy slogan were unveiled for the country’s first mobile operator, KenCell.

With the affable KenCell CEO Philippe Vandebrouk presiding, a new prepaid service that featured its lowest denomination scratch-card for Sh600 and its cheapest phone for Sh30,000 was launched, much to the derision of the few hardened scribes present.

Mobiles, one journalist pronounced in dour tones, were not a product that would do well in Kenya. They were too expensive.

A few months later I attended a launch of another mobile product for the other mobile company, meeting for the first time the executive who has the marked distinction of being the longest serving CEO in the business.

He was more known then for visibly getting irritated with journalists who did not quite understand the intricacies of this new animal known as a mobile phone network.

He once frightened this scribe into a mortified silence after a long lecture on why mobile was not planting base stations at the same rate as its competitor.

Time has mellowed the local CEO celebrity known as Michael Joseph, but evidently, MJ’s ambition to see his company remain the number one mobile firm in Kenya has not waned.

Hard as it may be to believe it today, the emerging internet industry was at the time more attractive to cover than the young mobile start-ups, even as techies like Brian Longwe pitted themselves against the monolith that was Telkom Kenya.

And so the launch of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point following months of debate felt more celebratory than official, marking a breakthrough that would see the start of a long liberalisation effort in the internet sector.

It was impossible to cover the internet sector without mentioning Africa Online, the start up that grew to become a pan-African enterprise and whose business model seemed to change every year.

On the hardware side, there was the engrossing HP/Compaq merger that brought change and turbulence to the sector, with aggressive fights for market share played out amongst retailers and the entry of the computer clone.

The hardware industry was also briefly rocked by the entry of the first local assembler of computers, Mecer, in 2003.

Meanwhile, the fast growth of the mobile sector in 2005 began to push the industry to the forefront of both local and international attention, and the year marked the beginning of the trials of Kenya’s third mobile operator, then known as Econet.