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The Nigeria @ 50 Organising Committee has had a difficult challenge convincing sceptics that a Golden Jubilee anniversary budget of N6.37 billion (slashed down from N10 billion by the National Assembly) in a country where 72 per cent of citizens live on less than US$2 a day is worth it, never mind that most Nigerians frankly do not see much to celebrate after 50 years of independence. The committee had also tried unsuccessfully to do a 419 on corporate Nigeria by cajoling them to pay for the month-long fiesta before the check arrived from the federal government and saved the committee from one day ‘eating the warden’s beans,’ as the Owerri people would say.
The most serious moral and ethical challenge facing the committee, however, is the tainted list of ‘worthy Nigerians’ the committee has selected to honor as part of the festivities. Wole Soyinka, Okonjo-Iweala, and Philip Emeagwali lead the pack Like most of our ‘honour’ rolls, this one is tainted by including people like Emeagwali with outright fraudulent resumes.
Emeagwali is no stranger to the Nigerian and international media, as well as to lecture therapy circuits and to black hero-hunters. A simple Google search for ‘Phillip Emeagwali’ yields about 29,100 results in 0.16 seconds! He has several slickly done web sites (e.g., http://emeagwali.com) where he promotes his ‘accomplishments’ that range from ‘The Bill Gates of Africa,’ to ‘Computer Wizard,’ ‘Internet Genius,’ the ‘father of the internet,’ ‘Africa’s greatest scientist,’ etc.
Emeagwali is originally from Onitsha, Anambra state, but was born in Akure, Ondo State in August 1954. He claims that, like many African school children, he dropped out of school at age 14 in 1968 because his father could not continue paying his school fees. Another version says that his conscription into the Biafran army in 1968 as a ‘child soldier’ during the civil war disrupted his studies.
Somehow, his father continued teaching him at home, a building crumbled by rocket shells, and everyday Emeagwali performed mental exercises such as solving 100 math problems in one hour. His father taught him until Philip ‘knew more than he did.’ An Igbo man with the level of education required to home-school a 14 year old school drop-out to accomplish this feat back in the mid-1960s being either poor or unemployed?
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Nonetheless, we are told Emeagwali studied hard (including by correspondence through the University of London for his ‘O’ levels) and eventually received a scholarship to Oregon State University, United States (at other times he lists University of Oregon) when he was 17 where he obtained a B.S in mathematics. That would have been in 1971, but Emeagwali also says he went to America on March 23, 1974—hardly the beginning of any academic semester anywhere in that country—but which would put his age on arrival there at 20 years, in any case. His also claims he earned three other degrees, including a Ph.D. in scientific computing from the University of Michigan.
His most outlandish claim is that in 1989, he used 65,000 processors to invent the world’s fastest computer that performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second, a feat that won him the Gordon Bell Prize which he touts as ‘the Nobel Prize for computation.’ His computers are supposedly currently being used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming. No one would be more deserving of the highest honours were these claims to be true. In fact, Emeagwali has cleverly choreographed these falsehoods into garnering recognition from the White House and the Nigerian government, including a postage stamp issued in his name in 2006. He even claims that he ‘was nominated by a top economist at the Central Bank of Nigeria’ for the issue of a currency note with his image which would have put him in league with great scientists like Isaac Newton on the British pound, physicist Albert Einstein honored on Israeli five shekel currency, scientist and inventor Benjamin Franklin on the U. S.100 dollar bill, and Galileo Gallilei on the Italian 2000 lira.
By any standards, Emeagwali is a brilliant computer scientist, a motivational speaker and writer, but he is a fraud. The truth is that he failed his PhD qualifying exam twice at the University of Michigan, and lost his law suit alleging discrimination by the university up to the Michigan Appeals Court. He has not published any paper in a peer reviewed publication in his field, let alone teaching a university class. Yet he routinely parades himself as a ‘Professor’ and ‘Dr.’
The research that won Emeagwali his ‘Nobel Prize’ had nothing to do with the Internet; it was in a very narrow field of application of computing to oil exploration. In fact, he was bumped to first place when the teams ahead of him with higher computing speed won a more prestigious prize and therefore forfeited the inferior prize. His claimed 41 patent or ‘patent pending’ don’t exist, just as his bold claim to consultancy relationships with some Ivy League institutions and the Pentagon remains a figment of his clever imagination.
Critics note that ‘it would take perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to scrub the Internet clean of his odium,’ that is, his ‘con job spanning several years of perversely populating the internet and his many websites with falsehoods.’ So, the Nigeria @ 50 Organizing Committee may be excused for not doing due diligence; the black press and the black community in America have also been duped. Of course, Emeagwali is not the only Nigerian to lie his way into prominence; but this is about show-casing fraud as our only accomplishment in 50 years of independence! There are many truly ‘worthy Nigerians’ at home and abroad deserving of this honour because they represent the very best in us. Phillip Emeagwali is not one of them.
