#FRONTROW: Giving banks a dose of their own medicine good move

A few months before I turned 20 years old, and beset by poverty, I took what is still my worst job to date. I was hired as a customer advisor for a major bank, a deliberately misleading title for a glorified hawker of the bank’s loans and credit cards.

Due to the rise and rise of Equity Bank, my employer and its top tier contemporaries were reaching out once again to the bottom of the pyramid customers it had previously considered too poor to bother with.

In fact, for many of these people, the bank had literally shut the door on them and closed their accounts and sometimes even entire branches. That was in the era of minimum operating balances when financial institutions would refuse your business if your account fell below Sh20,000 or some arbitrary amount like that.

Instead of accepting all depositors, however small, and playing a game of volumes, banks only sucked up to paper pushers in formal employment who had salaries that could be channelled through them.

Their outlets had sophisticated young graduates who spoke intimidating English and frowned on mama mbogas who visited their air-conditioned offices. And then Equity Bank CEO, James Mwangi, famously came along and turned all the pretentious

nonsense on its head and built an empire on the back of the same common folk his competitors had kicked out. They had seen the positive effects of having those ‘undesirables’ on his balance sheet and were now rapidly back-pedalling to accommodate them. 

UNSECURED LOAN

I was among an army of sales representatives charged with finding new customers as well as cold-calling existing ones, telling them they had been ‘pre-approved’ for a credit card or an unsecured loan.

We were so many, that we were housed in two buildings with entire floors to ourselves. With hindsight, our leads only bit 10 per cent of the time, but that was often just sufficient to keep you on payroll if you could convince your team leader that you’d do better the following month. I was so bad at being a banker at the tail end of the food chain, which I quit after four months. Before they fired me. Ironically, I ended up as a business reporter just a year later, covering the same industry I failed in, after selling products that nobody wanted.

The biggest gripe most Kenyans had then and now is that banking language is just deceptively complicated. “What wananchi are saying is that what the banks and the economists are saying ni Kizungu mingi,” Kiambu Town MP Jude Njomo told me, accusing

them of “too much English.” In other words, the large print giveth, the small print taketh away. The first-time legislator introduced amendments to the Banking Act last December to cap interest rates at 4 per cent above the Kenya Banks Reference Rate.

President Kenyatta signed it into law last week, meaning that banks cannot charge you more than 14.5 per cent for a loan.

Terms and conditions always apply. It is how bankers can promise you the moon and give you a sour deal and somehow get away with it. On the credit cards, you had to pick a repayment cycle, and if you missed it by even a day, you attracted a heavy

surcharge. The loan agreement had pages of fine print that we encouraged customers to quickly skip so we could count a sale. Even if they read it, the language was such deep legalese, that they wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend what they were signing.

In nearly every complete sale, there would be issues down the line that would need handling and often cancellations.

Mercifully for those of us that roamed the streets reeling in new catch for the bank, we wouldn’t have to deal with the cases when they inevitably became problematic. We would just transfer them to customer service and never have to worry about the

unsatisfactory experience they would be getting. Kenyan bankers treat customers like necessary evil, annoyances that they have to pretend to please because the benefits of their jobs are really great. The new directive that controls interest rates will begin to

remind them who they’re really working for - the consumer. It is a shame that we need a law to force Kenyan banks to be more responsive to customer needs.

They have given a litany of excuses for why interest rates remained criminally high as they have been.

Even as they have claimed to move closer to the market with mobile and agency banking, they have remained detached from the environment in which they operate. Former Gem MP, Joe Donde, started this battle nearly two decades ago - Uhuru’s signature

finally actualised it. The ivory tower has crashed and burned, how do the arrogant banks like it now?

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Why does Africa revere Mugabe?

Whoever still thinks that Robert Mugabe is a revolutionary must reside in some alternate universe where facts can be bent to suit a particular narrative. Yet to see him on the continental stage, you would be forgiven for thinking he was some sort of village hero.

See the looks on President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto when they received the Zimbabwean president on Sunday.

This is the same man the continent’s heads of states and governments respected so much, that they elected him chairman of the African Union.

“They are thinking that what happened in the Arab Spring is going to happen in this country but we tell them that it is not going to happen here,” he said in response to the #ThisFlag movement that is picking up steam in his country.

Maybe he doesn’t remember his history well, but the Arab Spring did succeed to change leadership in many parts of the Middle East and mostly gave power back to citizens.

What value is there in glorifying a man whose economy has so effectively gone to the dogs that it had to adopt another country’s currency?

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Media freedom? Stop kidding me

Last Monday, the popular website; gawker.com shut down after 13 years. It was an unexpected denouement that was watched closely in the American digital and traditional media as a moment never before seen. Tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, and his proxy,

Hulk Hogan, had killed a beloved web property in a long-running personal campaign against the site because it once published an embarrassing post he did not like. They won a $140 million settlement in a court case, and in the process bankrupted its founder,

Nick Denton. It is a strange place for an American organisation to find itself for a country that prides itself in media freedom. It seems to suggest that you can have as much freedom as you like as long as you don’t annoy a billionaire who can bankroll cases

against you until you go out of business. They should just go the Kenyan way and have their own media houses.