Recently when charlatans in the professions were exposed in both South Africa and Kenya, I was reminded of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s words in their 1982 song Ebony and Ivory: “We all know/ That people are the same wherever you go.”
In South Africa, the Gauteng Province Department of Health lodged a criminal complaint with the police against Matthew Lani, who fooled people by claiming to be a medical doctor and giving out medical advice via the TikTok app, where he had over 294,000 followers.
Lani met his Waterloo when several institutions, including the university he claimed to have studied at, publicly distanced themselves from him, exposing his false credentials.
Lani, who also called himself Sanele Zingelwa, is also facing criminal charges for impersonating a medical doctor after social media users and individuals who went to school with the real Dr Zingelwa came forward to set the record straight.
As I read about Lani’s mass deception I could not resist watching some of his TikTok content and after that, I’m afraid I judged the hundreds of thousands of people who had followed him on social media rather harshly for being so bloody gullible.
In his videos, Lani ensured he looked the part by wearing a stethoscope and scrubs and while I am well aware that as I have grown older doctors and policemen seem to have grown younger, the fake doctor looked like he was still in high school, at least to me.
Because I share a slightly twisted and somewhat dark sense of humour with many of my compatriots, the lyrics of Dr Kitch, a very suggestive calypso song by Lord Kitchener from 1963, came unbidden to my mind:
I am not a qualified physician/And I don't want to give this injection/ Dorothy is begging for trouble/She insist I should give her this needle/But, darling, one thing I want you know/Don't blame me for where the needle go.
If you don’t know the song, search for it online or ask your parents or grandparents who probably heard it and enjoyed it even if they would suggest that a Parental Advisory be slammed on the record now.
At around the same time as Lani’s troubles emerged, Kenya’s Director of Public Prosecutions asked the police to speed up their identity theft investigation into a person calling himself “Brian Mwenda” who has been exposed as a fake lawyer after the Law Society of Kenya disowned him.
Mwenda, who has reportedly been arrested, not only faces charges of defrauding clients while posing as a genuine lawyer, but his clients in the matters he is alleged to have won before the courts face the real risk of having their judgments nullified.
Dear reader, before you assume this impersonation of professionals is limited to Africa, it has emerged that Australia also has a Lani-type TikTok doctor of its own.
According to reports, Dalya Karezi, a social media influencer from that land Down Under, reportedly “shared medical advice, discussed serious topics such as reproduction, overdose and cancer with her more than 200,000 followers.”
After she was exposed as a fraud, Karezi received no jail time but earned a two-year community corrections order and was fined about Sh1.2 million which will cover the legal costs of the Australian medical regulator’s investigation.
Meanwhile, exactly a year ago, the State Bar of California exposed a Los Angeles man, Peter Shah, aka Peter Sharokhi and Pedram Sharokhi for having faked being a lawyer for at least five years.
The California Bar said the man had “stolen the identities of real attorneys in order to fool clients,” and had “practised law without a licence and forged the signatures of both clients and other attorneys as part of his scheme.”
I couldn’t help thinking there are probably hundreds if not thousands of Lanis, Mwendas, Karezis and Sharokhis out there who, while continuing to perpetuate similar dangerous frauds, have been reading the reports and thinking that the two were amateurs to have gotten caught.
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