When the Anthony Kila story broke, I was traveling in London and wrote a short piece explaining how one actually becomes a professor. A few hours later, Professor Sheriff Folarin, Professor of International Relations at Texas State University and formerly Covenant University’s first professor in that field, called me with one question: “Are we sure this man even has a PhD?” I had no answer.
Like everyone else, I had assumed the lower rungs of the ladder existed because the top rung was being claimed. Days later, Premium Times published its second investigation: no bachelor’s degree, a falsified master’s, and a doctorate it could not verify. Professor Folarin’s instinct was the correct one. He did not ask about the title. He asked about the foundation.
That instinct matters because students who sat in Kila’s classes insist he was brilliant. Several describe him as the best instructor they ever had, better than lecturers holding PhDs from Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard. I take that testimony seriously, and it is exactly why this story deserves a harder reading than the social-media mob has given it.
Brilliance in a lecture hall is not the question. The question is why a man that gifted would fabricate a professorship and every degree beneath it. The answer is familiar to anyone who studies cybercrime: this is a confidence scheme, built on false authority. A credential is a trust signal. Institutions, television producers, and students act on it without checking, in the same way a victim acts on a spoofed email from the “CEO.” The impostor’s charm is not evidence against the scheme. It is the scheme. A genuine PhD costs years of supervised research, examination, and public defense. That cost is what the title certifies, and skipping it while wearing the title is theft of trust.
There is a tell, and I offer it from personal experience rather than as a rule. The people who open every meeting with “Professor” or “Doctor” before their own names, and who correct you when you omit it, are disproportionately the ones whose titles do not survive a phone call to the registrar. Those who earned the rank rarely need to announce it. The work does the introducing.
Then the chorus began: “Nigerians again.” No. David Rush rose to senior executive at the CIA on fabricated degrees and invented military service, and survived seventeen years of American vetting. This is not a Nigerian failing. It is a human one, and the institutions that never verified are its co-authors.
Every one of these cases ended the same way: someone finally asked Professor Folarin’s question. OGUN Security Research and Strategic Consulting LLC (OSRS), a Texas-licensed intelligence and security firm (TX DPS #C30816901) with a team of experienced private investigators, including retired law enforcement and intelligence officers, conducts background and due diligence investigations on prospective employees, business partners, vendors, and associates before you sign, hire, or appoint. We verify credentials at the source, not from the résumé.
Intelligence. Protection. Strategy.
– Oludare Ogunlana
