Local News

Beginning of the end of the Post

By Staff Reporter

As more and more residents of Arusha confess to have stopped writing letters, a recent visit to the main Clock Tower Post Office along Boma road revealed an overloaded mail collecting box .

This should be a bad year for local Post Office business that is if stories being published by this paper are anything to go by; first an alleged mad man accosted the mail delivering vehicle at Kilombero market area holding it at ransom, demanding payments to some alleged damages.

A few days ago a reportedly mad dog stormed into their office at Friends Corner scaring all staff rigid. Earlier an irate motorist jumped the road embankment and rammed onto mailboxes destroying a few of them.

Now in the course of last weekend we caught this mail collection box overflowing with wrongly addressed letters.

This is however the box installed for the collection of letters with ‘wrong addresses’ apparently it seems the post office management had either forgotten to empty the box or due to reportedly slow business the Posta people have decided to give up any attempt to  check their trays being convinced nobody writes letters anymore.

Inside the Clock Tower post office our reporters discovered that the management has decided that if you can’t beat new technology then maybe one should befriend it. The Posta management has installed computers at which people who used to be their mail customers can now be seen surfing the web and sending electronic mail.

Recent research has revealed that an ordinary Tanzanian sends 0.5 letter per year while elsewhere in Africa the record in three letters per person per year. The Arusha Times through the ‘Street Talk’ column (on page 9) attempted to find out how many people here still write letters but all those interviewed said they do not.
                                                                         

                                                                                                                                
                                                                          Post office workers seem to have lost interest in attending mail.
                                                                           (Photo by Raymond John)

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