By Kelly Williams
10 Apr 2020
Tech multi-millionaire and founder of Shepherd’s Eye Mampuru Shepherd Modisha has been selling himself to the public as a visionary tech messiah, who is going to lead us out of the iron age and into the promised land. A world with cheap public transport and no car accidents, a world of convenience, safety and higher productivity. This dream that many South Africans are excited about could be a well-executed script of deception aimed at disguising the origins of Shepherd’s Eye, a company powered by stollen German technology according to a source who participated in the crime.
I visited the source in prison who is serving time for an unrelated crime. He claims to have been part of a group coordinated by an unknown woman. Every member of the group was specialised, he and Shepherd were brought in as drivers. His role was to collect a package from Shepherd in Pretoria and deliver it to another man in Johannesburg. The following are extracts from our conversation.
Kelly: What makes you sure that what you stole is what’s used by Mr Modisha?
Mr X: I did not know that until recently, I did not even know what we had stolen at first. We were not supposed to know. But before delivering it, I looked at the package, binoculars! I have been taking classes here in prison, and two months ago I picked up a magazine about the military. In the tech section they showed the same binoculars we stole: it turns out this is the most advanced night vision goggles there is, I read the specs and they are exactly the same as those listed on Shepherd's Eye for their self-driving technology, you do the math.
I asked our tech analyst to asses these claims, and after studying the two technologies he agreed that they were too similar to have been developed separately and independently. So if Shepherd lied about the foundations of his company, what else is he lying about? It is worth noting that Modisha was arrested multiple times when he was a teenager. In one of his recent cases, the docket disappeared, and he never stood trial. There are unproven allegations about him being violent. A man who wields this much power and always surrounded by women, it is hard not to be concerned given the rise in gender-based violence in our country.
I personally believe that this matter should be investigated by relevant authorities. Modisha is not driven by vision but by anger, his father was killed in a collision with a taxi and Shepherd vowed to “eliminate every fool on a steering wheel of a taxi”. He is doing that by automating away their jobs.
This is still a developing story.