During the COVID-19 lockdown last year, former AMCON Chairman, Mustapha Chike-Obi made the following level-headed and prosaic comment about managing the economic impact of the lockdown on poor Nigerians who are the majority.
“There are deadlier threats to life and security in Nigeria than Covid19 – malaria, hunger, poverty, Lassa fever, illiteracy, unclean water- to name a few. Why no states of emergency on those? Maybe because Covid-19 affects the high and mighty as well as the poor. A dangerous precedent.”
In response to this, a Nigerian tech CEO responded:
“You obviously do not understand the fundamentals of Covid-19. If left unchecked without non-pharmaceutical interventions Covid-19 can easily eliminate 500k-2m people within a year in any developed country in the world let alone Nigeria. Can Lassa fever? Can Malaria? Can Hunger? I am happy to have this debate.”
Read Also: Who is Kunle Afolayan?
A year and a half after this nonsensical completely unbacked flight of fancy? Said tech CEO is still regularly sharing his sage thoughts on everything from politics to pop culture to health. You see, he is this thing called a “tech bro,” and if there is one thing we now apparently know about the Tech Bro, it is that he (it’s always a “he”) is omniscient, very happy to share opinions on everything, and is never, ever wrong. The keys to total universal omniscience you see start with the magic words every junior developer starts with.
“Hello World!”
In my line of work, I am no stranger to overconfident or egotistical professionals. I have met doctors who made subpar decisions that cost patients their health. I have covered stories about pilots who lost their cool and started using the plane’s PA system to yell at a single passenger while parked on the runway, like a danfo driver screaming at a passenger who boarded the Oshodi-Mile 2 bus without change. I have met journalists who get so drunk on being the receptacle of information that they repeat stories they receive without any fact checking. Professionals acting poorly because of ego problems are not by any means exclusive to the Tech Bro.
What is exclusive to the Tech Bro however, is his almost religious commitment to always talking about everything including – or perhaps especially – topics that he is in no way familiar with, knowledgeable on, or qualified to speak on. The example at the outset is the tip of the iceberg. Remember the Tech Bro who insisted that the semi tongue-in-cheek “Calas Vegas” nonsensity mooted last year by the Cross River State government was a great and commendable idea? Still merrily tweeting his pearls of wisdom, some of which include tweets pleading with Nasir El-Rufai to run for president. Crying emojis and everything.
In actual fact, Kunle is an insecure shell racked with impostor syndrome who overcompensates for his painful lack of knowledge about the world by being as loud as he is consistently wrong
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Or do you remember the Tech Bro who had no idea what the backstory of the Tinapa Resort was, but that did not stop him from jumping into the conversation to declare that Tinapa was a “great” idea and yours truly “lacked vision” for not understanding the unspeakable genius behind it? For those who are not aware, Tinapa was in fact, supposed to be a special trade zone integrated with the Calabar Port to give the industrial southeast access to a port. When political considerations scuttled this vision, Donald Duke then spunked $450 million on a shiny piece of nonsense in the rainforest – something he and everyone knew was going to fail.
Tech Bro had no idea that any of this happened, but when he saw a journalist who is in the know speaking about it, he instantly jumped into the conversation to criticise the journalist and speak with “authority.” No prizes for guessing that this would be the same Tech Bro who would later characterise the systematic slaughter of thousands across the Middle Belt as “little genocides” that should not be overstated.
“Kunle” needs to take a rest
In my assessment, the issue with Nigerian tech bros goes to the heart of what is wrong with the tech ecosystem in Nigeria and arguably even beyond. The scalability and eye-watering numbers involved after relatively few years of work convinces the lucky tech cofounder/dudebro that he is in fact a genius, as against Kunle, 32, Regular Local Man.
Kunle might only ever actually do real work for a decade and then sell his stake for silly money or get a job at Microsoft – which is to say, the same thing. Even without this, the ambience and atmosphere of tech can be so unorthodox that it barely resembles work at all. From all these cues, Kunle gets the unfortunate idea that he has “disrupted” life itself and has figured out some sort of immutable truth about the human condition. He subsequently begins to think of himself as a Great Leader, or a Person Of Consequence, similar to a Mandela or a Deng.
Meanwhile it is easy to forget that Kunle’s entire claim to genius is a 7-9-figure bank balance, a tech platform that he no longer has the capacity or vision to take forward, and a verified Twitter handle with 100,000 impressionable university student followers hanging on to his every word. Kunle also gets invited to speak at TED talks and lots of “How to be a Genius Creator of the Future World like Me” conferences. In his mind, he is Nikola Tesla, Lee Kuan Yew and Che Guevara all rolled into one.
In actual fact, Kunle is an insecure shell racked with impostor syndrome who overcompensates for his painful lack of knowledge about the world by being as loud as he is consistently wrong. The more he bloviates and speaks with a rehearsed air of presence he thinks, the less people will dare to realise that he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about more than half of the time. Kunle is not a genius. Far from it. He is simply quite good at writing certain types of code, and his possession of this (essentially vocational) skill met a (very fortunate) market opportunity in the still-virgin world of tech.
He is about as genius as a lucky panhandler during California’s Gold rush Unfortunately because the world worships money and social capital, and because he is too young to be surrounded by anything but fawning admirers and hangers-on, Kunle does not get the memo and his ego grows from the size of a football field to a small asteroid.
The world is currently suffering from a plague of Kunles from Yaba to San Francisco. These profoundly mediocre men with more ego than life experience are genuinely trying to recreate humanity in the image of their Reddit/Chan poster culture – for no other reason than they sincerely believe that they are some sort of gold standard. Kunle has no business being any kind of “cultural leader” while still a profoundly ignorant, narcissistic passive-aggressive ball of insecurities with delusions of grandeur.
But for the love of all that is good and precious, who on earth will tell him?
