High school represented, for most of us, the age of letters, despite the fact that they were odes to puberty, forgotten as soon as they were sent. I received my first letter in form one. Errrm... actually, form two. Every Tuesday and Thursday a prefect would read out the names of incoming letters during meals or assemblies, and the entire school would be quiet, everyone on the edge of their seats praying and hoping a certain gachungwa met two weeks before in a school function would remembered to write.

But like all good things, high school came to an end. The only letters I get in my post office box now are electricity bills, cheques for dividends and promotional material for colleges and skin moisturisers  I have not sent a letter for a long time, maybe the occasional success card to a distant relative in a distant corner of the country every odd year or so.

The amount of letters that Kenyans have been sending has been on a drastic decline. According to statistics from from the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), during the last quarter of 2012, the total number of letters sent locally declined marginally by 0.6 percent  to 16.6 million  from 16.8 million in the previous quarter. For the same year, the total number of letters sent declined by 32.2 percent. This decline has been attributed to the preference of the emails, chats, instant messaging, and SMS over the mobile phone, all options being relatively faster and cheaper.

So why send emails instead of letters? An email costs you the duration of time you will be online (or the amount of data you intend to send), often a short time since you only need to be online to send, and it is delivered immediately. In addition to text, some chat features enable voice and video communication. How does a letter compete with that? An SMS is practically free and serves the same purpose as a letter, right? If you send me an SMS in the place of a letter or birthday card there is going to be hell to pay. Snail mail is not as slow as you might expect. A quick look at the Posta Kenya website shows that a letter sent within the same town will be delivered within 24 hours and within two days to the rest of the country, and yet this is not enough. There other issues such as the safety of the letter.

How then do you get individuals to be interested in sending letters? Do not tell me letter writing is a dead art, it is a reality I do not want to accept. It still gives me great pleasure to go back to those perfumed letters from high school, where she was dedicating me Bob Marley songs and plagiarizing Pablo Neruda. It might seem narrow minded to think of the traditional letter as an exercise in aesthetics, especially when there have been job cuts at Posta, but the letter needs to be advertised that way if people are to take up the art.

Maybe it is time let the art of letter writing go. I have not heard a single TV or radio ad for promoting the sending of snail mail over the past years. I am inclined to assume that the bulk of customers come from companies which frequently send out mail to its customers, like Kenya Power. It is possible to check for your electricity bill through a mobile phone so even that might become obsolete. In an aim to increase revenues and stay relevant, the Postal Corporation of Kenya came up with other innovative ways of making money, none of which include promoting snail mail. This includes services such as Expedited Mail Service (EMS). Within mail service there are services such as direct mail marketing, business reply service and philately. The strategy is to boost their revenues by reducing reliance on mail delivery.

The same data from CCK shows that total investments in the postal and courier industry declined by 24.1 percent during the year 2011 to record KES 148 million. Certainly we cannot expect a return of the letter amid such an environment. It seems like we have to accept that the traditional letter has become obsolete. Perhaps the guy who invented smoke signals also thought the technique would last forever.