The Postal Corporation of Kenya is shutting down 125 of its 625 post offices to save roughly KES 1.012 billion a year in running costs, according to the corporation’s audited results for the year to June 2025. Nearly half the branches have already been closed. The rest will be gone by the end of June 2026. That trims Posta’s national footprint by about 20%, down to 500 outlets.
Alongside the closures, Posta is restructuring its workforce. Management positions are being cut from 511 to 336. A further 504 staff have been declared excess and are being moved out through an exit package. Postmaster-General and CEO John Tonui says keeping all 625 branches open in their old form “would have continued to drain capital away from the investment we need to make in courier, e-commerce, payments and addressing.”
On paper, Posta is doing better than it has in years. It posted a KES 488 million profit in the year to June 2025, reversing a KES 1.08 billion loss the previous year. But that profit is largely cosmetic. It was boosted by the recovery of a KES 1.54 billion debt that Huduma Kenya owed Posta in rent arrears, a one-off. Strip that out and the underlying business is still bleeding.
A delivery boom Posta isn’t in
Here’s the awkward bit. Posta is shrinking at the exact moment Kenyans are sending and receiving more parcels than at any point in history. Social commerce on Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp has created a daily wave of small deliveries. AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon orders land in Nairobi by the planeload. Kilimall and Jumia is still running. Yet almost almost none of this traffic goes through Posta.
Instead, Kenyans use Pickup Mtaani, which powers more than 50,000 vendors and has handled over a million deliveries with parcels starting at KES 120 in Nairobi. They use SpeedAF for shipments from China. They use G4S, Fargo Courier, Sendy, and a long tail of undocumented boda-based couriers.
The MPost story tells you everything
MPost was the one genuinely clever idea in Posta’s recent history. It turns a mobile number into a postal address, with SMS alerts when mail or a parcel arrives. It launched in 2016, partnered with Safaricom in 2019, and could have been the bridge between Posta’s branch network and the e-commerce wave.
It didn’t survive contact with Posta. In November 2023, MPost moved its headquarters from Westlands to Norrsken House in Kigali, with founder Twahir Mohamed citing expansion plans. Multiple reports, including from Techpoint Africa, pointed to regulatory friction in Kenya as the real reason. By mid-2024, MPost had launched its e-P.O. Box service in Rwanda in partnership with the national postal service iPosita.
Then Posta hiked MPost charges from KES 400 to KES 2,050 a year, a jump of more than 400%. We already wrote about how illogical that price hike was for a service that was already losing users to faster, cheaper, traceable alternatives. Pricing a struggling product out of the market is not a turnaround strategy.
What the closures actually mean
Branch closures on this scale are not recoverable. Once a post office is shut, the lease is gone, the staff are gone, and the small-town mail-collection habit dies with it. The corporation is also pivoting toward agency banking (a five-year deal with Guaranty Trust Bank was announced) and is hunting for a strategic investor. Neither will rebuild the network it’s tearing down.
The simple read is this. Posta is not closing offices because the delivery business is dead. The delivery business is the fastest-growing logistics segment in Kenya. Posta is closing offices because it lost the delivery business to companies that built faster, cheaper, more trusted alternatives, and then it taxed and over-charged the one digital product that might have saved it.
