As he lined up at a supermarket in Naromoru 24 years ago to buy his first mobile phone line, Harrison Nderitu was hoping to end a tedious routine that he used to go through to communicate with his wife.

He was working in Nairobi, and the only way to reach her was through one of the two phone booths in Naromoru.

“I would tell my wife back home to be at the booth at a certain time to wait for my call,” he recalls.

When Safaricom took the mobile phone lines to Naromoru, Harrison was among the first to get one.

It was in a small supermarket called Gracious. There were only three people in the queue: Harrison, a businessman named Njoroge Wainaina, who today is a Member of Parliament, and a man named Judah, now deceased.

Harrison, now 70, was issued a certificate, which he has to date and has stored among his prized possessions in a briefcase that also holds his children’s birth certificates, his logbook and title deed.

Before the advent of Safaricom, SIM cards were grossly expensive, and mobile phones were deemed a preserve of the rich.

In 1997, when Safaricom was founded and came into the market as a fully owned subsidiary of Kenya Posts and Telecommunication Company, the cost of a SIM card was more than KSh 200,000.

By the year 2000, when Vodafone Group PLC acquired a 40% stake in the company, the price had dropped to KSh2500, making it affordable for Kenyans to own a Safaricom line.

“When Safaricom launched, communication became easier. The only challenge was that Naromoru didn’t have a network; you could only have it up until Kenol, but then they set up the mast around 2001,” Harrison recalls.

With his first mobile phone, a Siemens, Harrison was now able to call his director at work. The only problem was that airtime was KSh100, which was only worth 3 minutes of talk time, and “That was a lot of money back then for airtime.”

Like Harrison, Simon Mwangi Muriuki’s first phone was from the Siemens brand, which he bought for KSh3500. Safaricom lines had significantly dropped in cost, and by the time he bought his first SIM card, they were KSh600.

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The 65-year-old, a driver from Mukurwe-ini, Gaikundo, says he became a Safaricom customer when it was about six months old.

“I don’t remember exactly when I bought my first line. I’ll have to check the book where I wrote it down. This is my first card, and this is the first phone I ever bought,” he said when he met the Sambaza Furaha na Safaricom caravan in his home town recently.

He was awarded a phone, with a t-shirt and cap thrown in, even as he proudly showed off his treasured, 24-year-old SIM card and phone.

Simon has big plans for his new smartphone and is glad he no longer has to rush to the kiosk to buy Bamba 20 airtime. “Now I buy it on the phone. You can do almost everything on your phone.”

And he does a lot on his phone. “I send and receive money. I use it for banking. I buy things from the shop, the agrovet, the hardware if I need mabati, cement, or steel, and I communicate with my workers and other people by sending them messages,” he says.

As he takes a trip down memory lane and reflects on life before mobile gadgets, William Kanake Karumba is happy he doesn’t have to send letters as a mode of communication anymore.

“We used to send letters through the post office, and it would take a month or more for the recipient to get it. Sometimes, your letter would even get lost.,” he says.

William bought his first mobile phone in 2003, along with his SIM card, which came in a round tin package when the company’s tagline was “The Better Option.”

“After doing menial jobs here and there, I saved up enough to buy the phone for KSh 5000 and my line for KSh250 so that I could be part of Safaricom,” William says.

William was also among the lucky customers who were gifted with smartphones during the Sambaza Furaha campaign.

For 21 years, he has been a loyal customer “because of M-PESA and how convenient and quick it is, even when receiving money from abroad. Fuliza has also come in handy on occasions I don’t have money, like yesterday when I got KSh1000 from Fuliza.”

In its 24-year journey, Safaricom has relied on its dealers, who are among its business partners, to drive transformation through its products and services.

Each year, when Safaricom celebrates its anniversary, Ashish Shah, a Nakuru businessman who was among Safaricom’s first dealers, also celebrates his personal milestones and partnership with the technology company.

“Safaricom dealers have played a part in the company’s accomplishments because they have made sure every place is green, right? Dealers have to be appreciated because they are the pillars of Safaricom’s success,” Ashish says.

Ashish Shah is the owner of Happy Go Limited, a Safaricom dealership in Nakuru, and when Safaricom turned 24, he also celebrated his son’s birthday.

As he was celebrating the birth of his son, he was also starting his business by selling Safaricom scratch cards. Today, his dealership is a 24-hour shop that sells phones and all the trimmings that come with it and has won several awards from Safaricom.

“We were the first people to start a 24-hour dealership in Kenya. It was a big achievement, and people loved it because they could get service round the clock. They didn’t have to rush at six pm to an M-PESA shop,” Ashish says.

Ashish and his wife started Happy Go Limited, which has now grown to employ about 120 people directly and indirectly.