Taurai Chinyamakobvu

Taurai Chinyamakobvu
Taurai Chinyamakobvu
Occupation	Entreprenuer
Organization	FloCash

Taurai Chinyamakobvu is a Zimbabwean entrepreneur and investor. He is a partner and investor in Flocash Zimbabwe, a joint venture with a UK payment gateway services company. He is also the founder of Pazimba, an e-commerce start-up business focusing on providing multiple retailers with a convenient platform to sell their goods online.^[1]. He is also an investor in Golix a Zimbabwean founded cryptocurrency company operating in Africa.

In late September 2018, Team Pachedu, an opposition political activism online group, shared what they alleged to be evidence that proved that Matigary (a controversial anonymous Twitter account) and Taurai Chinyamakobvu were the same person.

Background

Taurai is interested in contemporary tech-driven business models and in technology transfer and development in Africa. He consults Japanese companies that pursue business opportunities in Africa. He has previously worked in banking and telecommunications and holds two Masters of Business Administration. After completing the Washington Fellowship, Taurai plans to take e-commerce mainstream in Zimbabwe with a vision to do the same across Africa.

Taurai wrote a couple of articles about Bitcoin on Techzim as a guest author.^[2].

Accusations of being Matigary

Team Pachedu’s evidence. Team Pachedu came up with 13 ‘pieces of evidence’ to come to the conclusion that Matigary is Taurai Chinyamakobvu. You can make up your own minds how conclusive or not this evidence is:

Evidence 1: Matigary has a strong affinity towards cryptocurrency

Matigary is said to be an avid proponent of cryptocurrencies and so does Taurai Chinyamakobvu.

Evidence 2: Linguistic Fingerprint

The same way everyone has a unique fingerprint, so does everyone has a unique way of writing. This is called linguistic fingerprint. Its said the likelihood of two individuals to have a similar linguistic fingerprint is quite low And Matigary and Taurai’s accounts are said to both have same linguistic fingerprints.

Evidence 3: Matigary doesn’t use full stops

Team Pachedu says Matigary rarely uses tweets in his tweets, and so does Taurai Chinyamakobvu. Thus they are said to have the same punctuation fingerprint.

Evidence 4: Matigary likes Japanese culture

Team Pachedu released a picture with a number of tweets in which Matigary was talking about the Japanese culture. And he plainly said he is fond of martial arts. This was then mirrored with a photo that showed Taurai Chinyamakobvu practising martial arts.

Evidence 4: Phone number and email address

Matigary’s phone number and email address are said to be in the public domain. So, Team Pachedu noticed that the number they obtained in the public domain leads them to Taurai Chinyamakobvu. Team Pachedu went as far as to disclose Taurai Chinyamakobvu ’s home address in the process.

Evidence 5: Powertel affiliation

Matigary claims to have once helped Powertell to solve a problem. Incidentally, Taurai Chinyamakobvu’s CV shows that he was contracted by Powertel back in 2008 for four months.

Evidence 6: Shona Dialect When naming a Dung Beetle in Shona, Team Pachedu says both Matigary and Taurai Chinyamakobvu used the same Shona dialect to name the beetle.

Evidence 7: Writing Style

Team Pachedu have established that Matigary and Taurai Chinyamakobvu share a common writing style in terms of the sentence structure, punctuation, spellings, grammar, contractions etc.

Taurai’s response

Taurai’s first response was to lock his Twitter account. He then said he was alerted by friends that his name was being linked to the @Matigary account. He said he doesn’t use Twitter much and that Matigary seems to spend too much time on Twitter, time that he Chinyamakobvu just doesn’t have.

Chinyamakobvu explained that his knee-jerk reaction was to lock his Twitter account since he was getting follows by the truckloads in a very short space of time.^[3]