Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Phillip Emeagwali's Fraudulent Activities Have Tainted the LSAT

Ahhh, Bode, those late night, early morning alternative medicine informercials! When I wake up early or retire late, I sometimes watch a few minutes of those for entertainment. The "interview" is part of the show, the act. The interviewer is part of the fraud. They even make the background look like Larry King's CNN studio! It is all designed to look like an actual interview with a genuine medical expert. In fact there is a notorious character that is the king of those frauds--one Kevin Traddeu (sp), who has been convicted several times in several states, has paid fines and served short jail terms. But he's still at it. When the Feds shut down one operation, he moves into another remedy or therapy. And they say it's all legal until a crime is actually committed. The explanation that I've gotten is that it's all legal until there is a complaint by an injured patron or by a group of them explicitly alleging fraud--that is, deception for monetary gain or a failure to deliver on the agreed-upon terms of the transaction. Unfortunately, for folks like you, there may be no recourse since these fraudsters are so smart as to cover themselves in endless disclaimers cleverly disguised in their packaging and on the bottom of the screen. They essentially say that you willfully assume a risk by trying out their "experimental" therapy, etc. They use lawyers to submerge their operations in legalese and legal ambiguities. That's why it's so hard to convict them or secure long, harsh sentences when they're prosecuted. That's the part that really gets me. The sentences for white collar crimes (even those involving millions of dollars and life savings) are so absurdly light in America that they are in my opinion incentives for fraud. What stops our "medical" informercial king from simply setting aside a few millions from his fraudulent haul for legal defense and for the payment of the paltry fines that conviction normally attracts? He can budget for those pesky troubles and still continue to operate, which is what he has done over the years.

The proliferation of academic fraud is for me even more troubling. A few months ago, I read a Chronicle of Higher Ed article on a woman who got a job at a major university by claiming falsely to possess a first degree. She was actually a high school dropout or graduate. She rose through the ranks and became dean of admissions! Her employers said she slipped through the cracks of their scrutiny but the truth is that no one bothered over the years to check the claims on her resume, and on the many occasions when the came up for promotion and had to undergo reviews, no one revisited her claims. I think her fraud only came to light because, emboldened by getting away with it for more than two decades, she applied for a much higher profile position (can't remember the details). I am sure there are several such folks in the academic world; maybe not in mainstream academe but in administration. By all accounts, she did her job very well and was well loved by everyone who worked with her. Owning up to the fraud, she said she just learned on the job and became good at it. Resumes are routinely embellished, padded and sometimes falsified outright. That's why it is no longer sufficient to simply state truthfully and blandly what your qualifications and previous experiences are in a CV or resume. We now have resume coaches and counsellors--even professional resume writers who will rewrite your resume for s fee to make it more appealing to employers. What they do mostly is to raise your profile by exaggerating and adding luster to your achievements and experience. It is now a part of the fabric of our capitalist culture. Emeagwali's fraud has to be understood partly in that context; those cultural, institutional, and societal enablers created a perfect environment for his deception to thrive, although I do think that in terms of moral responsibility for his actions, he alone should bear it.

So, yes, I do believe that there is a broader culture of self-promotion, deception, profit-motivated lies, impersonation, and self-misrepresentation into which Emeagwali's scam can be analytically inserted. I want to read it as one expression of capitalist excess, the abusive dark side of the fanatical promotion of enterprise and entrepreneurship. I do believe that increasingly the line between legitimate/ethical enterprise and its darker, seamier cousin is blurring, aided, in my opinion, by the marauding global march of capitalist triumphalism. That said, I do also believe that there is something historical and transcultural about the cultural tolerance for what some would describe as "harmless, enterprising fraud." In America, the cultural idiom of the "snake oil salesman" is a key site for investigating this cultural provenance of exaggeration and over-promotion. Note that the snake oil salesman, though a universal American figure of fraud and misrepresentation for personal gain, is an integral part of American capitalist lore, implicitly structuring many discourses on American ingenuity, self-help, enterprise, and can-doness. In Nigeria, the notion of two moralities--one for the home and one for the sphere outside the home (Peter Ekeh's and others)---comes to mind. This ambivalence is a very instructive one. Many human communities, especially capitalist ones sometimes do not seem to know when to draw a line between outright fraud and fraudulent enterprise because they fear that attacks on home-grown fraudulent enterprise might be construed as an attack on the spirit of enterprise and self-help that defines their self-image. Therefore, often, they let the law do the job for them. Unfortunately, the law cannot anticipate all forms of criminal ingenuity and is often not malleable enough to stop people like Emeagwali and Tradeu unless its letter or spirit is explicitly violated.

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Olabode Ibironke <ibironke@msu.edu> wrote:

Moses,

 

Long ago, I bought a drug after seeing what I thought then was a convincing interview of a medical practitioner on 1000 secrets that medical doctors do not want you to know. I got sick from using the drug and shared my story with a friend at Wisconsin, Madison, who told me he also bought the same drug I was describing and went on to explain that those guys, although they perpetrate their crimes in broad day light on TV, are actually charlatans!!! We cannot stop commenting on the tabloids each time we are at a store, and the blatant lies they peddle about the high-ups. Emeagwali belongs to a broader culture of self promotion and aggrandizement...; (remember Hillary Clinton's story about coming under fire during her trip to  the Czech Republic, or something?) My question is why this society has allowed that culture to thrive as if it is a normal part of society? The usual explanation is that law enforcement have better things to do than go after these folks but I increasingly begin to think that there is a genius in allowing these incredulous claims a space…. What do you think?

 

Bode

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 10:26 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Phillip Emeagwali's Fraudulent Activities Have Tainted the LSAT

 

"hey are basically saying, so what if he lied about his achievements, his degrees, his marriage, and has delusions about being Father of the Internet, must man not wack? And they wonder why things are the way they are with us."

You're too generous Ikhide. His supporters are also saying: his fraud has not hurt anyone personally; it is a victimless fraud; has he been arrested?; misrepresenting yourself  (even for pecuniary gain) may not be fraudulent; etc etc. This whole Emeagwali discussion was as depressing for me as it was eye opening. It opened a window for me to see just how impossible it is now in Nigerian discourse to forge any clear consensus on what used to be straightforward matters of right and wrong--ethical and unethical. The infinite reduction of such simple clear-cut matters of good and bad to a dead-end, farcical debate about degree, circumstance, effect, and nature of the fraud makes one weak with hopelessness.

I saw this video several years ago. Not all of it; it's too painful and embarrassing to watch for me as a Nigerian. I just watched the first 4 minutes or so again. Did you hear the "father of the internet" say that he accessed the 65,000 processors that he purportedly used to "invent the connection machine" (which he claims is the bedrock of internet technology) over the internet? That was hilarious in its absurdity. I thought the man invented the internet. How come he was accessing things over the internet and supposedly relying on the internet for his experiments even before he invented had it? Or was this a different internet from the one he invented? That's why they say a good liar has to have impeccable memory. The deluded fool invented the internet; yet his "invention" depended on an already existing internet, on which he claimed he relied for his experiment! The man is to be pitied. What a clown!

 

 

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Ikhide <xokigbo@yahoo.com> wrote:

The most disturbing thing to me is that Philip Emeagwali had the audacity to place my photo

 next to his- by cut 'n paste  wizardry-  to make the fraudulent claim that I was his wife.  I stumbled on  a newspaper that

innocently bought into the lie and was able to get an apology from the editors.

 

 

For the last few years I have had  a disclaimer on my website at:

www.africahistory.net

 

What a jerk! What a fraudster! He should be stopped.

 

Professor Gloria T. Emeagwali

Prof of History and African Studies

 

Prof,

 

Interesting. For a long time I thought you were his spouse. And then I started spying your disclaimer and my heart went out to both of you, I thought you had suffered a painful, perhaps bitter divorce. Little did I know that the scammer had cut and pasted you into an imaginary marriage. The man is a loser. What breaks my heart is the feverish defense of his fraud by people who are supposedly learned. They are basically saying, so what if he lied about his achievements, his degrees, his marriage, and has delusions about being Father of the Internet, must man not wack? And they wonder why things are the way they are with us.

 

In the video below, please watch "Professor" "Dr" Emeagwali making fools of his supporters in his own words. Hear him bask in the adulation of winning the Nobel Prize of computing, of having two masters and a PhD, of being the father of the Internet, etc, etc. Listen to him and you will be filled with compassion - the man actually has delusions of grandeur.

 

Enjoy.... I am done with this fool. And his posse of foolish supporters:

 

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMFy9sBLFQQ&feature=related 

 

- Ikhide

 

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