I know many who rose to fame doing exactly what was described in the piece below. This is illegal.
-- Permit me to recount my personal experience with something closer.
In 2004, I wrote a policy paper (I will keep the subject so not to out anyone) and gave it to a professor who had a link to the then president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
Few months down the line, the professor's brother was appointed into one of Obasanjo's numerous commissions to lead a new project for the Federal Government.
When the project came on stream, I could see without using binoculars where my policy paper ended. It ended on Obasanjo's table and fetched my professor's brother a job.
Few months after this, the professor walked up to me to ask for my CV. Without anything said about my policy paper, he offered me a job.
In the Netherlands in 2012, I submitted drafts of two projects to a friend to read through. He condemned the two, thrashing them both.
Two days later, the two projects were published on a major university's website as new direction the Center was embarking upon. My friend was the anchor of the two projects.
I reached out to our other mutual friends, copying them on our exchanges on the two projects, and the screenshots of the University publication to announce the new direction. I wrote to my friend, after he refused to pick my call to meet with him. He refused to meet with me.
This was someone who gave me accommodation and fed me for 6 months when I was in dire need. In addition, he loaned me 1000 Euros at the hour of my need. I knew his family - mother, wife, kids, sisters, brothers, etc.
Prior to this, I had written and published two essays and included him as coauthor when he was faced with termination of employment for unproductivity - just to help him stay on his job. I also helped him with two drafts that were later published and, as fate would have it, his position was confirmed and he got promoted within the year.
I thought of reporting to the authorities of the University about this intellectual fraud but for three reasons:
1. I had this strange feeling that given ask the ways that I have intervened in his matter, I was somehow complicit in his intellectual fraud.
2. He helped me greatly in my hours of need, giving me accommodation when I was sleeping at train station in cold Netherlands, losning me money to I was able to payback, some I did not even paid to date, etc.
3. I know many members of his family, who treated me like one of their own.
If I outed him as a fraud and he was sacked, how would I explain and excuse myself to his family, most especially his young son that also calls me "Daddy"?
But a fraud is a fraud and no amount of great deeds can bestow cleanliness on a pig.
I cut all my ties with him, ever since.
.........
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN IS A LITERARY FORGERY
A claim for copyright infringement has been made by Anne Giwa-Amu against Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Harper Collins Publishers in relation to the literary work, Half of A Yellow Sun. Anne Giwa-Amu, a law graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, is demanding damages and an account of profit as a consequence of the infringement of her copyright in the literary work SADE.
In legal papers submitted to the Court, Ms Giwa-Amu alleged: "…a substantial amount of original material found in SADE, an earlier copyright work also appears in Half of A Yellow Sun a later work...Ms Adichie could not have included this by coincidence". Ms Giwa-Amu alleged that in 1998 she sent a copy of her manuscript to Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, Nigeria. "Chinua Achebe, a writer linked to the Biafra propaganda effort, was the main decision maker on the Board of Directors at Heinemann". Ms Giwa-Amu was informed that Chinua Achebe read and accepted SADE for publication for senior secondary school in Nigeria under the sub-title 'SADE United We Stand'. Chinua Achebe later endorsed and promoted Half of A yellow Sun and one of his poems appears on the first page which would have entitled him to royalties from the sale. Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie share the same literary agent, The Wylie Agency.
Ms Adichie wrote in the Premium Times that after the publication of her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chinua Achebe tried to arrange a meeting with her. Ms Adichie claims that after her communication with Achebe she wrote Half of A Yellow Sun. Ms Adichie admits that she had no experience of the civil war as she was born in 1977. She claims to have compiled HAYS after reading thirty-one books by writers who had first-hand experience of the war.
In the legal papers, Ms Giwa-Amu alleged that Ms Adichie reworded and expanded her novel SADE and copied the setting, structure, plot, language, themes, characterization, content, form, subject matter, supporting arguments and scenes. Ms Giwa-Amu has claimed that every incident from her literary work, SADE, has been copied and expanded upon to create a literary forgery.
In 2016, the case was submitted at the County Court at Cardiff, Cardiff Civil Justice Centre, 2 Park Street, Cardiff, CF10 1ET. It has since been transferred to the High Court in London and back to the Central London County Court.
Claim number CO1CF281
tel: 02920 376400 or 02920 376417.
(c) Anne Giwa-Amu
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