Who is Tariku Negasi and why has he put us into this predicament? For years many have revered him, but not I. Whenever a phenomenal mind is discovered in Africa, they are taken from us by the West. We were happy with that. To fight the norm would be to invite the wrath of the West. But then Negasi came from Ethiopia, the only country on the continent to never be colonized. It was on brand for Negasi to fight, I guess.

When he refused to sell his invention at age 15, the spectacular DEV 1.0, the rest of us got discredited. Everything negative was said about us and our innovations. We were labelled unrefined and not “yet good enough”, all in a bid to convince the rest of the world that the best and palpable minds were outside Africa. I credited Negasi’s folly to his youth. People tried to convince him to go to MIT in America or Oxford or Cambridge in the UK. We wanted him to get the education that we could not provide for him and the life that the socio-economic politics of Africa could not sustain, not with our then current crop of leaders, much of whom have not changed till today.

The scientific community that celebrated him, secretly began to despise him. He could’ve made a name for himself outside the continent and then come back with whatever wealth and brand recognition he got to rebuild, but no… he disappeared.

Why? No one knows, but his invention could’ve outlived his interest and allowed him to explore other things. After all, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram have not lived this long because they stuck with their initial inventors, but by accepting the ever expansion of capitalism and Western dominance. It isn’t surrender. It’s just being real. As real as the collapse of Negasi’s Dev 1.0, something that could’ve been here as a household name.

Now he’s back, claiming to be a politician. There are no politicians in Africa, just stooges. The few true leaders we have, have been branded terrorists or at best, militia agents & guerrilla governments. Negasi wants to solve the world’s problems he said. With which money, sir?

He said he’s back with Dev 2.0. PLEASE! He’s an opportunist and I can’t blame him. The Internet has been shut down since 2052, the digital COVID they called it, as we isolated back to the way the world was before the Internet, but just after the invention of the telephone. Capitalism changed as the Internet was no more and the West didn’t want to lose any more power to the Russians or the Arab world.

In comes Negasi offering to reconnect the globe through Dev 2.0. A supposed superior version of the tech he initially refused to sell. Or is it? Maybe it’s the same thing with just a few kinks worked out, not enough to be labelled “2.0”, but the rebrand is important. He’s used his new found fame to negotiate and persuade the actions and laws of nations in a largely positive way. Maybe he really is the ethical Elon Musk that the papers have been calling him. Maybe I was wrong for hating him when he refused to sell his tech in the beginning, but it seems weird to me to have had the power to save the world and only to do so at one’s convenience. He’s now the most beloved billionaire just for reconnecting people to the Internet so they can send dance videos and post memes again and the West can make more money. So why do I hate him?

Just last week at the Climate Change Summit after having helped nation’s solved their problems, mostly Western nations by the way, because those were the ones who showered him with the most attention, Negasi made a bold statement. He wanted to solve humanity’s problem by removing what he saw as its main problem: humans. Us. He wants to get rid of us by transmitting our consciousness to a digital world. “We can’t destroy the world if we don’t live in it,” he said.

Now I don’t mind if all the rich Westerners ‘f*ck off‘ to Mars and live in a virtual version of earth nor do I mind having a world with less people. What I mind is the human hardware that would be left behind to maintain the system that allows this to happen. Because we know it won’t be the Westerners.

Written by Abdulnasir Imam