How Nigeria killed its 20-year-old tech genius, Mudashiru Ayeni, in 1971

In 1971, in Nigeria, a young man sat on his bed, holding wires in his hands and a small black box in front of him. Four batteries powered it. A few buttons controlled it. When pressed, it answered one question: Is the boss available?

If the answer was yes, it was stated accordingly. If the boss was busy, it said so. If he was out, it said so. Today, we would call this automation a basic chatbot. We would probably build a startup around it. Back then, they called him mad.

His name was Mudashiru Ayeni. Most people knew him as Muda. He was 20 years old, a student at one of Nigeria’s well-known secondary schools.

He liked electronics and dismantling radios. He liked imagining machines that could replace routine human work. In his small room, he built what he called the Mudagraph, also known as the Receptograph, a battery-powered robot receptionist that could answer calls and tell visitors whether the boss was around.

It was simple. It did not think, speak or learn. It followed pre-set instructions. But for Nigeria in the early 1970s, it was unusual. Most offices still depended (you can also use a present tense for the word and be correct) entirely on people, and even answering machines were rare.

Graphic representation of how Mudashiru Ayeni’s machine would have worked

Mudashiru Ayeni believed in what he was building.

He believed it mattered and could help his country. So he wrote a letter. He wrote to the school authorities and to government officials. He even suggested that he should present his ideas to Nigeria’s Head of State. He wanted to explain how technology could improve administration and productivity. He wanted to be taken seriously.

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Instead, he was sent to Yaba, the popular Yaba left.

The school authorities interpreted his ambition as delusion. They referred him for psychiatric examination. Over several weeks, Muda was interviewed eight times by a psychiatrist. After all that, he was declared mentally sound. By then, the damage had been done.

He was banned from classes. His education stalled. He left school without distinction, without honours, without the institutional backing that might have protected him. Nigeria had diagnosed curiosity as a problem.

After leaving school, Muda returned to his room. He picked up his soldering iron again and continued working on his device. He refined it, improved the wiring, and tried to make it more expressive. He also reached out to the Federal Commissioner for Communications at the time, Aminu Kano (now late). Kano granted him an interview and listened. He encouraged him. For the first time in months, Mudashiru Ayeni felt taken seriously.

According to reports, then, some businessmen even showed interest in his invention. There was talk of possible commercialisation and of an office staffed by machines. For a brief moment, it looked like things might turn around. And then, the story ends.

No follow-up articles. No records of patents. No company registrations. No later interviews. No obituary. No biography. Mudashiru Ayeni disappears.

More than fifty years later, searching for him is like searching for a ghost. His name appears only in scanned magazine pages and social media screenshots.

There is no digital trail, no institutional memory, no public archive that explains what became of him. He might have become an engineer or a technician. He might have abandoned technology entirely. He might have left the country or lived an ordinary life. We do not know.

What we do know is that his environment was not designed to keep him.

In the 1970s, Nigeria was expanding its universities and research institutes. Committees and councils were being created. Science policy was being discussed.

On paper, innovation mattered. For instance, in 1970, the military government established the Nigeria Council for Science and Technology (NCST), now Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology (FMIST), by decree, formally to coordinate national R&D and advise on a science policy.

In practice, support systems were thin.

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There were few pathways for independent inventors, few grants, few mentors, and few incubation spaces. If you did not fit neatly into academic or bureaucratic structures, you were on your own.

Mudashiru Ayeni did not fit. He was too young to be taken seriously, too ambitious to be comfortable, too unconventional to be understood. So he fell through the cracks.

Today, Nigeria celebrates tech founders, startup accelerators, and AI entrepreneurs. We talk about building the future. We host conferences and announce funding rounds. We quote Silicon Valley. It is easy to forget that experimentation existed long before hashtags and pitch decks.

Muda was experimenting in 1971 with almost nothing. No internet, no microcontrollers, no open source libraries, no tutorials. Just wires, batteries, and imagination. If he had been born fifty years later, he might have joined a hardware hub or received a seed grant.

He might have built a company. He might have failed and tried again. Instead, he was evaluated for sanity.

His story raises an uncomfortable question.

How many others like him were lost? How many students were discouraged? How many tinkerers were dismissed? How many early ideas were buried?

We often talk about brain drain and talent leaving. But sometimes, talent does not leave. Sometimes, it simply disappears inside the country. It is buried under paperwork, scepticism, and silence.

Mudashiru Ayeni’s robot receptionist was not revolutionary by today’s standards. It would not impress a modern engineer. It was closer to an automated signboard than to artificial intelligence. But it represented something more important, which is the instinct to automate, to rethink systems, to imagine alternatives. That instinct is fragile. It needs protection.

When it meets ridicule instead of support, it shrinks. When it meets institutions that cannot recognise it, it fades. When it meets no record keeping, it is erased. Today, we remember Mudashiru Ayeni only because one magazine bothered to write about him. Without that article, he would be completely invisible. There is something tragic about that.

A young man once believed he could contribute to his country’s industrial future. He built a machine with his own hands. He asked to be heard. He was examined instead. Then he walked away from the public record. We do not know where he is, what he became, or what he could have been. All we have is a small black box, four batteries, and a forgotten story. And perhaps a warning.

That innovation does not always fail because ideas are bad. Sometimes, it fails because nobody knows what to do with the people who have them.

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