National Post Office Going Digital, But is It Too Late?

The Independent (Kampala)

Didier Bikorimana

23 June 2011

opinion

It’s almost eleven in the morning and the National Post Office (NPO) branch in Butare town, South Rwanda, is almost as quiet as a cemetery. Business, explains one employee, has fallen as internet and mobile technologies have grown across the country. “We no longer get many people coming to send or receive their letters,” she says. Other services, such as sending and receiving gifts, postal parcels and hard-copy books, she adds, have remained in tact.

In order to address this decline, the NPO is in the midst of launching more information and communication technology-based services such as e-shopping and e-commerce service that would allow Rwandans to eventually send and receive electronic mails or money from any of the 170 plus Universal Post Union’s (UPU) member states, of which Rwanda’s been a member since 1963.

“I am not worried that we may soon run out of business,” responds NPO’s Director General Célestin Kayitare. “We are making our services more and more accessible through the internet.”

Statistics issued in January by the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) indicate that approximately 35 percent of Rwanda’s estimated eleven million population use mobile phone communication, a significant figure in a country where 17 years ago internet and mobile phones were nonexistent. And its impact is being felt in both the village and the cities.

“Since January, maybe I have sent a fax once or twice. All that I used to do with fax, I now send it as an email attachment,” says Clotilde Kazayire, who works as a secretary at the National University of Rwanda. “Internet is becoming the quickest way to send documents.”

Even for Espérance Mukamusonera from rural Butare, the presence of mobile phones has made post office services irrelevant. “I can now phone people who are in a remote place like the United States of America and they can hear me. So why would I still use the post office? There is no need,” she says. “I could go to a neighbor to borrow sheeting in order to dry some grains to the sun and find that my neighbor has gone away. But now I can easily call them beforehand and make sure that they will be around. And this saves my time. So to me, this is a sign of development.”

The NPO, a 100 percent government-owned institution, dates back from the colonial period and in 1992 it was granted a 30-year monopoly by Rwanda’s parliament, then known as the National Development Council.

NPO currently has 19 branches all over the country even though the UPU recommended in 2009 that there should be one NPO for every 9000 Rwandans, meaning there should be over 1000 branches across the country.

“We can’t open all those new branches for the sake of it,” reasons Kayitare. “That would cause more deficit in the network as already eight out of the 19 branches operate in the negative and rely on subsidies from other branches. But between now and 2013, we plan to have 14 more branches. For the rest, we are planning to enter partnerships with some private people and our vans will be just collecting different mails from them.”

The shortage of branches led some travelling agencies to begin their own courier services, an act that contravenes NPOs monopoly. As a result, in October 2009 a law was initiated to ban illegal courier services from this business.

“There’s a vacuum in the current law which brings about market de-regulation,” says Kayitare. “Regulation will come when the new law is enacted next year.”

But according to MP Juvénal Nkusi, Chair of the Public Account Committee, the draft law has yet to be tabled before parliament. Moreover, any new law, he adds, needs to appreciate the reality of today. “It was a right to Rwandans, however rural their location, to receive their letters passed through the post office. But today they can by themselves directly call people who are even outside the country.”

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