Update: All issues have been resolved.
Original story…
There are many ways that Kenyans use to pay their bills. The best ones are those that charge customers less, or are outright free.
However, there aren’t many free services that allow customers to pay for their satellite TV, water bill, or Kenya Power bills for free, because these services have to make revenue too.
On the bright side, the few that work this way are actually great and used widely by their loyal customers.
These services make their income from partnerships, so they can cushion the lost revenues that could have boosted their profits from charging their customers.
One of the services that has since garnered a loyal following is the Mwangaza App.
It has been around for years and works as advertised. All you have to do is load the wallet using your M-PESA, and then you can pay for bills without incurring transaction charges.
I know many people, including yours truly, who use Mwangaza just to purchase Kenya Power tokens.
It is also one of the services you can you to send airtime to other networks without paying a little more in the name of service fees.
This is because there are a ton of Paybill numbers that customers can use, but those ones usually start charging customers for airtime sharing above KES 100, and some of them do not even work.
The Mwangaza App, however, has not been working for the past week.
This is had made a lot of customers unhappy because such downtimes are usually addressed in a timely manner.
Mwangaza, nonetheless, has been unable to fix the issue. One of the concerns is that a customer would load funds to their Mwangaza wallet, but the funds are not reflected.
“We are currently working on updating the MPESA messages that came in during the downtime,” says Mwangaza.
This appears to be taking a while, so if you are among the people who deposited funds to your wallet but they haven’t been reflected, then you might need to wait for a while as the Mwangaza Team fixes the issue.
Last weekend, there was an issue with token generation from Kenya Power and third-party services. Other products, including the KCB app, were working. It is also at that time that the Mwangaza App stopped responding.
So, which service do you use to pay bills without incurring high transaction costs?
