Inventing Change / Lagos Ch 4

Amara thinks of Kofi.
She remembers him well,
that cynical look,
like he'd seen too many broken promises.
They met at a climate conference.
He was the only one saying out loud
what everyone else was thinking.
"We won't change anything" he had said.
When the funding didn't come through,
Amara reached out to him.
She explained her project,
a system that could work.
He listened,
not too excited,
but in the end,
he agreed.
Together, they started working.
Kofi designed the mechanics,
while Amara provided the data and the vision.
They wanted to build a robot
that would do the dirty work,
the kind no one else wanted to do.
The robot was small, compact.
It moved easily in the water,
thanks to the sensors Kofi installed.
Amara called it Nkiru,
which means "the best is yet to come."
Kofi shrugged. "It's just a name,"
he said.
Nkiru could spot and collect plastic from the sea.
It worked.
Amara watched it glide through the waves,
gathering debris one piece at a time.
Not everything, but enough.
For her, it was already a victory.
But over time,
Nkiru started doing things they hadn't planned.
It didn't just collect plastic.
It picked up algae, small fish, even coral.
Kofi said it was a malfunction.
"It's messing everything up" he kept saying.
Amara listened quietly,
but she knew it wasn't just a mistake.