How much is the worth of Safaricom bonga points in Kenya shillings? I attempted to answer this same question in the article the value of Safaricom bonga points. This is because many a Safaricom subscriber erroneously cite the amount of money already used in Airtime as the worth of their Safaricom Bonga Points. You will hear, for instance, a subscriber complain bitterly that Safaricom is stealing from him or her for pricing a phone worth Kshs 50,000 for 250,000 bonga points, yet he or she would have spent shs 2.5 million on those Bonga Points.
In the article, I was able to arrive at an average figure for 1 shilling for every five bonga points as the correct worth of the bonga points. This I did by checking the worth of Airtime one could redeem for each bonga point, a figure that tallied, at the then price range for data bundles, with data bundle redemption plans.
Given that Safaricom sells Airtime, SMS, Data Bundles and more importantly smartphones for Safaricom bonga points, and that a few years ago it allowed subscribers to sambaza those bonga points to other Safaricom subscribers, there are many who have been accumulating bonga points from friends and families so that they can reach a target like 250,000 bonga points for reasons of owning an expensive phones that would otherwise cost them 50,000 shillings in cash money.
There are times when one can find himself in a ditch of brokeness but at the same time have a huge accumulation of Safaricom bonga points. In such times it won’t be a matter of second thought to sell the bonga points to those with valid dreams of owning top end smartphones and tablets. But as usual it is never easy for the two groups:- those willing to sell vs those willing to buy bonga points, to find each other. This is what made one of our readers who had accumulated over 40,000 bonga points to ask us for assistance in selling them. We declined. Her pricing was way too expensive compared to the true worth of Safaricom bonga points at the time, and even now.
But there was one guy who was wiser than the rest; he decided to incorporate Safaricom bonga points in his product portfolio. He is Dennis Makori who runs Onfon Media, a Nairobi based IT company that deals with bulk SMS services, mobile banking and short codes.
When Makori realized that there were many willing to sell their Safaricom bonga points for quick cash, and still there are many more willing to buy the bonga points to later exchange them for Safaricom goodies, he set up a platform through which sellers could sell him bonga points at shs 0.20 a point but buyers would get them at 0.35 a point. The seller wasn’t selling at a loss as the prevailing redemption rate was the same shs 0.20 a point. But Safaricom was not happy with his business.
In October 2013, Safaricom heard of Dennis Makori and his dealing with Safaricom bonga points. Safaricom decided to shut the service down. In the meantime, Safaricom went into auditing Onfon’s Bonga Points trade and two years down the line, they have now allowed Onfon to officially trade on the Bonga Points. This means that from now henceforth you can officially dial *464# to sell your Safaricom bonga points for shs 0.15 down from the previous shs 0.20; or you can buy a few points to add to your Safaricom bonga points portfolio at shs 0.25 down from shs 0.35 before the shut down.
That means, for every bonga point traded, Onfon makes shs 0.10 down from shs 0.15 he used to make before the shut down. Now imagine that Onfon traded Safaricom bonga points for only four hours before he was shut down but was able to handle 100,000 bonga points – that’s some juicy traffic that could translate to well over 23 million shillings a year.
