Nigerian Yakubu Nura Wins World Physics Competition [ Intriguing but Unconfirmed by Me]
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Nigerian Yakubu Nura Wins World Physics Competition
- Recognized as father of modern Einstein's planetary equation
Dr. Yakubu Nura
Dr. Yakubu Nura of the University of Maiduguri, in Nigeria, has won the World Physics Competition by defeating about 5720 contenders from 97 countries.
World Championship-2019 in Physics (Einstein's planetary equation) acknowledged the outstanding international contributions and selected him "based on international meritorious competition".
Dr. Nura’s research article was announced winner among 5721 nominations from 97 countries, screened for the World Championship-2019 in Physics (Einstein's planetary equation).
Nura, who hails from Yobe State, is now recognized as the father of modern Einstein's planetary equation studies in Physics.
The award was instituted to identify brilliant scientists and academicians around the world through world championship.
The World Championship is organized by the International Agency for Standards and Ratings at international level.
Nura, (world champion and fellow, Directorate of Physics, IASR) plays a vital role in the advancement of scientific knowledge in Physics, reports Voice of Nigeria
Here is a link to the only non-Nigerian and non-African site on which I have been able to find this announcement.
It has an informative interview with Yakubu Nura
Moses Ebe Ochonu
Dr. Nura Yakubu is another Gabriel Oyibo of GAGUT infamy. He is like the Benue and Ekiti fellows--I forget their names-- who claimed to have solved the same decades-old mathematical problem and were, for a time, promoted and celebrated by some Nigerians only for their scam to unravel spectacularly after Professor Farooq Kperogi exposed them.
Yakubu is the latest in a long line of Nigerian academic scammers. The "award," whose silly, made-up name I will not even dignify by repeating, is bogus, as is the IASR that recognized Yakubu.
The IASR does not even have an independent website but rather a poorly, shoddily constructed google webpage with fraudulent, hifalutin, grammatically challenged gibberish. It has zero academic or intellectual credibility.
The fraudulent "agency" "awards" people nominated "monthly" (and who presumably pay a fee) with its "certification" in many fields and for many products and services it lists on its puerile google page. In other words, anyone can simply "nominate" themselves for an award in any category they choose.
This scam is similar to but much less sophisticated than the "who is who" schemes for which most people with any serious web presence or visibility have received many solicitations. Even as a scam, this is a really amateurish one.
You only need to spend 10 minutes on google to unravel this scam, which is not even sophisticated. I can't believe that Saharareporters, Voice of Nigeria, Kadaria Ahmed, and NTA were all scammed and fell for the fraud.
The case of Saharareporters is particularly perplexing because a few years ago myself and Ikhide R Ikheloa partnered with them to expose the multilayered scam of Philip Emeagwali. Their reliance on the Voice of Nigeria for their story is not exculpatory. Basic due diligence would have told them that this is a scam.
Only one or two google searches would have saved them the embarrassment and professional reputational damage. Oh well, this is Nigeria, where basic critical thinking skills and intellectual skepticism are now rare commodities.
By the way, I salute the courage of Dr. MD Aminu for exposing this scam despite the obvious risks associated with such an enterprise in a country desperate for heroes and thus gullible and primed to be scammed. He was basically publicizing the fraud of "his brother" in the Nigerian sense of brother. That's courage.
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Moses Ebe Ochonu
Now that Dr. Nura Yakubu's "Father of Planetary Equation" scam has sunk in, let me make a few preliminary comments about why we are so gullible to academic fraud in Nigeria.
1. Our educational curriculums at all levels lack a critical thinking component. On the contrary, we're trained and socialized to accept things at face value whether we understand them or not--whether they make logical sense or not. Our educational system encourages rote learning, not critical thinking that supports Socratic learning and scholarly skepticism, which are in turn necessary for inquiry, discovery, and innovation.
2. Related to the reason above, our culture and our educational system are founded on notions of authority--the authority of elders, the authority of leaders, the authority of kings, and the authority of learned men and women. We hardly question the claims of people we adjudge to be figures of authority, even when simple logic and common sense indicate to us that there is a problem with the claims. The claimants must be right, we tell ourselves, because they can't possibly make false or erroneous claims, given their positions.
3. We tend to defer to people who peddle or pretend to be versed in esoteric knowledge systems. That is why scams like this largely occur in the STEM fields but rarely in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. The difference is that the latter fields are accessible and are less esoteric. The former fields are extremely esoteric and most of us are not versed in their methods, protocols, and lingos, so any charlatan can make claims and temporarily get away with them. Our journalists and social media commentators and sleuths have no capacity, competence, or will to investigate or even understand constructs such as "Einstein's Planetary Equation," the "the Reiman Hypothesis," "Interplanetary physics, etc. Sometimes it's plain old intellectual laziness. Folks are too lazy to use google and other readily available tools to do simple inquiries. Those in STEM fields who should call out such scams are not social media savvy and/or do not have the media clout or online presence for their corrective intervention to break through and change public opinion while educating us.
4. Our xenophilia (the uncritical adulation for and credulity towards anything that comes from "the abroad") makes us uniquely gullible to such scams. Any award that claims to originate from or looks like it has origins abroad is accorded credibility and we suspend our critical faculties and inclination to scrutinize. And if the name of the claimed "award" has the right tagline such as "international," "global," "planetary," "universal," "world," etc., we become even more credulous.
Cornelius Hamelberg
It’s a very saddening/disheartening that some Nigerians don’t hesitate to take out their knives and forks to cut up and destroy and then defecate on any fellow Nigerian who - without their explicit consent or acknowledgement is raised to fame by any dubious sources or so called authority/ ies.
Philip Emeagwali denies that he ever referred to himself as “The Father of the Internet" – nor are we to suppose that the late Chinua Achebe ever claimed the title “ The Father of African Literature”
This afternoon, just as I was boasting to someone that some bloke from the University of Maiduguri which is at the heart and epicentre of Boko Haram terror has just been “Recognized as father of modern Einstein's planetary equation” - as per Adepoju’s dramatic headline, the sceptical response was, “Is he working in Nigeria?” The sombre fact is none of them is going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for anything.
I clicked on the Ikhide R Ikheloa link provided Don Ochonu, to see what kind of savagery had been dealt Philip Emeagwali but the link only lead me to this space , which in effect means that I have been blocked from his Facebook page. No hard feelings – as far as I can remember, I haven’t visited him at Facebook for the past decade and I have never regarded him as “the father” of any kind of criticism, indeed some of the people I know who write for The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books – are sufficient for me.
However, I did google and find this greatest claim to controversial fame his quite trite claim that the Holy Bible is “a great work of fiction, a tool of oppression...” and that “Africans” should stop believing in it
I wonder what Cornel West and my Baba Kadiri has to say about that kind of put-down of the Holy Bible..
I also wonder what Mister Ikheloa has to say about the Holy Quran of al-Islam
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Toyin,
Many thanks. You saved my ass. I doubt that I would have been able to live down the derision.
It's so irritating with people who want to be famous, at all costs.
In this case, but for your cautionary scepticism bordering on pessimism ( “Intriguing but Unconfirmed by Me” - another instance of “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”) - but for you and the now understandably venomous and indignant Professor Moses Ochonu I would have gone straight ahead and posted this item as “Breaking news” and thereby made a complete fool of myself, holding myself to eternal ridicule by some of the Oyibo Afro-sceptics that I know, as if Cornelius Ignoramus is capable of believing everything that is written on every scrap of Naija tissue and as if the outside world is not already sufficiently aware and on high alert about possible 419 fraudsters even in academia, and I am not willing to be the only exception...
But thanks to people like Oyekunle Olukotun and the Alagba Olukotun DNA, Nigeria has not become the Galilee or the Nazareth of Jesus’ heyday, even as we expectantly await the Messiah.
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Toyin,
I should just like to add that I understand Ochonu’s venom - the ire and fire mostly coming from the other hard-working and productive fellas who must feel the agony in knowing that any false exaltation of mediocrity is a threat to the hierarchies of the meritocracy and their own and future real achievers well earned reputation, and that each and every time any such false exaltation is successfully unmasked - thank God – the wider public is informed, the fake idols are thereby taken down unceremoniously and the status quo is preserved.
Fake idols sully the reputations of the worthy can even sully the reputation of an entire country or nationality.
Sadly – and true, variety/diversity is the spice of life but some of the rancour and bitterness being expressed lack the bitter-sweet coating of e.g. public intellectual Pius Adesanmi and his charming, infectious satirical humour, his engaging iconoclast language, his over-kill - the reason he had over 43, 000 followers on Facebook. We all miss him, dearly. Miss his pungent reflections and incisive cogitations on the ever-deteriorating state of affairs in the Naija nation. What would he have been saying now, about the challenges being faced and being met by the Buhari Administration on a daily basis, about Boko Haram, about the on-going Fulani Herdsmen debacle, about the war against corruption, and about this latest mishap, itself inseparable from corruption in high academic places, when Dr. Yakubu Nura , the villain of the piece instead of strongly denouncing all the wrongful praise and inappropriate honours/ accolades being heaped upon him is in ecstasy being honoured with a a dubious title that only increases his illusions of grandeur/ thirst for recognition and apparently not at all embarrassed about being touted to the world academic community, as “world champion” (indeed) “by defeating about 5720 contenders from 97 countries”
Remember what Albert Einstein once said,, "If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”
And now, the Germans, the French and maybe the Jews too must be laughing heartily when they read this preposterous false claim that “Nura, who hails from Yobe State, is now recognized as the father of modern Einstein's planetary equation studies in Physics.”, laughing and saying, maybe with the rest of the racist world, “Typical 419er, the nigger is a Nigerian!”
In my not so humble opinion (and there is no reason for even the ignoramuses to be humble about these matters) in addition to taking down the fake idols who perch themselves on any pedestal on which they do not rightly belong, shouldn’t Nura’s acquiescence ( as an accessory to the crime) also be suitably punished – so that the signal is clear that such buffoonery will not be tolerated by either their peers or we the down-trodden plebeians over whom they want to exalt themselves. The punishment should be both a precedent and a deterrent.
Paradoxically, with each unmasking, the damage that’s already been done to the reputation of the nation should not be underestimated. For instance, hypothetically speaking, I told a New Zealand academic about a Nigerian who I said had seven PhDs on as many different planets, could speak twenty modern languages, had published over 200 best sellers and scholarly articles in peer review journals and far from being impressed she started to laugh. “How do you know that these are not fake degrees?”, she asked. I told her that they were not. “How do you know that he didn’t purchase some of these degrees?”, she asked and at that point, I thought that we were now getting close to racism in the academic sphere, so I exclaimed, “But he’s a Professor!” - WHERE? - she wanted to know, from Cornelius Ignoramus, so I told her: In Washington DC!
I’ve tried to explain it as “the Dada Idi Amin syndrome”, the lust to acquire great degrees and titles, “Son of God Almighty”, “Father of the devil”, “Father of Jazz”, “Father of African Poetry” etc. and in the case of Dada Amin, as we all know, it was, “ His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular” and these titles and degrees which seem to have a greater meaning and resonance in the heads of pre-literate societies, are usually derided by the intelligentsia but seldom contested by the Professor of Everything’s doting, worshipful disciples. Such insecure people want to be worshipped. By everybody. You tell them where it’s at, that you are not impressed, that you don’t even want to be famous, you have your own favourite opera singers, you become their enemy.
On the basis of his not rejecting the title of “ World Championship-2019 in Physics “ which he apparently applied for, he knows better than anybody else that he’s never going to get a job at M.I.T or at Cambridge or at Stanford. And everybody in the relevant committee knows that he’s never going to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, any time soon...
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Obododimma
Gloria Emeagwali
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Gloria in Excelsis Emeagwali !
Having followed your videos and your many reports from Ethiopia and Eastern Africa
I continue ´to swing with Ishmael Reed: I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra
with an emphasis on
“the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips.”
Talk is cheap and much of theology, diversity of opinions, atheism, etc. is just that. There are whole libraries and sites on the internet, YouTube ,etc. full of the kind of stuff that Pa Ikhide as agent provocateur is advocating and assuming that he is serious about what he seems to be advocating, the rolling back of centuries in order to adopt his new vision, his revolutionary consciousness of traditional African beliefs as a way of life would of course not be easily achieved without some unforeseen social upheavals, because the implications are vast, especially in this post-enlightenment age of science and technology and the questions of reverting to those beliefs in Modern Nigeria. Are Fela Kuti’s critiques not along the same lines?
I have my own reservations since Pa Ikhide has not said explicitly that it’s not just the so-called “New Testament” that he’s talking about when he mentions “The Bible”; but I anticipate that he will probably respond that he means the whole hog, which, all things considered, is not very circumspect of him (but he may have lost all hope of every being democratically elected President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria or a God-fearing appointment as Chancellor of the University of Maiduguri, or an appointment as lecturer in Semiotics at the University of Biafra, in Umuahia), because it beats me that a man of sound mind should want to diss the 80 Million plus Nigerians who are Christians, praying fervently & seeking heaven, by telling them to abandon Jesus and return to what the missionaries once frowned upon as primitive rites, witchcraft, ancestor worship, ju-ju, voodoo drums, human and child sacrifice, evil spirits etc. - in a word, what the Salafists refer to as the one unforgivable sin: Shirk (idolatry/ polytheism).
To me, the meaning of “The Kingdom of Heaven” is very clear. As Jacob Neusner puts it on page 19 of “a Rabbi talks with Jesus”:
“When I accept the yoke of the commandments of the Torah and do them, I accept God’s rule. I live in the kingdom of God, which is to say, in the dominion of heaven, here on earth. That is what it means to live a holy life: to live by the will of God in the here and now”
Out of curiosity I still wonder what Mister Ikheloa has to say about the other half of Nigeria - the Holy Quran of al-Islam and whether he would like to dismiss that great religion too and request that all Nigerian Muslims return to Kufr and the practices of pre-Islamic Jahiliyyah. However, he knows that “discretion is the better part of valour”, just as he knows that “cowards die many times before their deaths” even if Sir Salman Rush-die is still officiously alive…
He should not forget that there are also the Jews of Nigeria ...
In my own initial post about the matter in this thread I did sign off with this Cause For Optimism
In all fairness – especially if he’s unwilling to give himself the right of reply in this our august forum, either because he will not deign to be here or because he doesn’t have the stomach to get bogged down in the lion's pit and thereby put what all that he prizes as his literary ego in the danger zone of being badly battered and bruised in battle even though I expect that he should get some support from e.g. Baba Kadiri (obviously not a Qadiri) who for starters demands that the Good Lord address him Baba Kadiri and all his tribesmen in perfect Yoruba and not in Hebrew or Aramaic, in order for him to believe anything.
But there’s really no point in lambasting Sheikh Ikhide just when he’s about to settle down to enjoy his retirement at least a few thousand miles from his native Edo State (as the crow flies over the same route as the Middle Passage)
About the Quran which was revealed to the greatest lovers of poetry at the time and in the Quraysh dialect, the Quran itself has thrown the challenge and Pa Ikhide is free to pick up the gauntlet, but as The Quran records it in Glorious Arabic,
“And if ye do it not – and ye can never do it – then guard yourselves against the Fire prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is of men and stones.”
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Cornelius Hamelberg
A quick aside:
There’s no point in trying to make a mountain out of Pa Ikhide’s molehill as there’s really nothing new in what Pa Ikhide said recently, maybe in jest. Pre and post colonial literature is replete with that kind of critique: The Jesus of Lubeck , the floorboards of Elmina Castle which separated the chapel above from the chained African slave quarters below; how many times have we not heard that when “they” came with the Bible “We” had the land. “We” closed our eyes to pray and by the time “we” opened them again “they” had taken “us” and the land by surprise.
In The Vultures David Diop’s laments the days
“When civilization kicked us in the face
When holy water slapped our cringing brows...”
Over all this looms the overarching Curse of Ham
There’s a backlog of anti-colonial and anti-Christian sentiments to be found in Pa Achebe’s magnum opus about the pristine, pastoral life in Africa which also had its own fair share of problems even before the White Man came. There was, of course, no dearth of inter-tribal wars, some of which prisoners of war were shipped downriver as war booty – slaves captured in inter-tribal wars, the warriors tribe A fortified by the deities of tribe A against the warriors cursed by their deities but blessed by the deities of the enemy tribe, tribe B. Much of that Africa is already gone, never to return, Some of it has been transplanted to Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil.
Today, some of the ethnicities that were formerly constantly at war against other ethnicities are now mostly at least superficially united under the banner of the Cross of Jesus as are those who are united in al-Islam and hope to be in the army of Muhammad (S.A.W.) when the Mahdi (a.s.) arrives and calls for action.
There’s also some of the redemptive poetry of Tchicaya U Tam'si
There’s more than enough for thought with Kwame Anthony Appiah on religion
This month I’ve been learning quite a bit about religion and the Indian sub-continent from the marvellous Arundhati Roy and her “The God of Small Things”
Cornelius Hamelberg
Upper Egypt ( For Gloria in excelsis etc )
A major correction: Re- “This month I've been learning quite a bit about religion and the Indian sub-continent from the marvellous Arundhati Roy and her "The God of Small Things"
Should read : This month I've been learning quite a bit about religion and the Indian sub-continent from the marvellous Arundhati Roy and her " The Ministry of Utmost Happiness “a very rewarding read and unputdownable from the very first pages. Food for thought for the poets and priests. ( N.B. Imam Sahib is blind)
“Anjum said nothing for a long time. Then she leaned across and whispered back, untree-like, “Imam Sahib, when people speak of colour – red, blue, orange, when they describe the sky at sunset, or moonrise during Ramzaan – what goes through your mind? “
I mention “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” because it’s of uttermost relevance to Pa Ikhide’s attention-seeking and nonetheless toothless armchair remonstration – toothless and just so much empty air like some of the other armchair apostles of lost causes who may be frantically beating their chests or blowing breeze where no one can hear them talking shot about “ African Renaissance man” and saying nothing about The Harlem Renaissance because I doubt that any other than the already converted and forever faithful to Olodumare are listening or can hear and understand
In this day and age of modernity and change, the holy Jews have the same approach to their ancestral religion – going back to your roots - so say some of the rabbis: if any of your ancestors went astray, often as a convenience, mostly because of ignorance, assimilated for wordly gain or for whatever reasons then it’s the duty of the descendants to get re-grafted, through conviction of course.
That’s what 37 – 41 of The 613 Commandments is all about: ( “Don't let them fool ya, or even try to school ya!”):
37. Not to love the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
38. Not to cease hating the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
39. Not to save the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
40. Not to say anything in his defence—Deuteronomy 13:9
41. Not to refrain from incriminating him—Deuteronomy 13:9
BTW, the number of African churches, African pastors (both male and female) mushrooming in Stockholm is frightening! There must be at least fifty – Nigerian, Ghanaian, Congolese , Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Eritrean. Many centuries ago it would have been akin to “carrying coals to Newcastle” (for Afrocentrism’s sake “ carrying coals to Enugu”) except that Sweden has the reputation of being the least religious nation in the world.( It’s the Sabbath and I just got a call from my Better Half who’s in Berlin at the moment with her Book Club - seven females. See what I mean? ) So, far from successfully ministering the ethnic Swedes, these churches are mostly catering to the African diaspora over here, their members probably arrived in Sweden with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, their Bibles as cabin luggage. I’ve listened to some of them - I tried, but it simply didn’t make any sense - any sense at all. All I can see clearly is the pastor playing the part of the witchdoctor/ medicine man or stage magician, always ready to perform some of the minor “miracles” such as praying for you if you have a headache (“in the name of Jesus” ) but I have yet to see any of them raising the dead although they say that they have such abilities and they quote some words to that effect . But these pastors and their churches fulfil other vital functions , are vibrant social communities, provide family counselling, spiritual therapy, some moral guidelines, preach against corruption to their born-again. I’ve been to a few Nigerian parties where hosts of people were from the same church, hence the al-cohol / holy spirits, ginger beer , moin-moin ( my favourite) some ashawo and copious ogogoro.
If indeed there is a profit incentive it’s unlikely that any of the local African pastors are going to be blessed with riches like the pastors of the Nigerian mega churches