FAKE credentials have become a global menace. Those who refuse to sacrifice sleepless nights have resorted to using the mighty dollar and technology as their refuge for their academic laziness. It is estimated to be a billion-dollar industry (New York Times).

The National Clearing House, a Non-Governmental Organization in the United States which offers academic verification services, has expressed concern about the rise in the number of falsified academic credentials cases. In 2005, the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education Report found that almost every country with a university system has recorded growing fraud cases. Some crimes in academia include plagiarism, cheating, unauthorised collaboration, intellectual theft, purchasing assignments, falsifying your identity to write exams for others, downloading assignments from the internet, falsifying data, misrepresenting records and publishing academic work that belongs to others. All of these infractions are patently ignominious, but presenting outright fake achievements takes the cake and is the highest crime in academia.

The nexus between fake certification and corruption 
The falsification The International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) has established the five (5) values of academic integrity; honesty, trust, respect, fairness and responsibility. These values are in congruence with the requirements for leadership that is not corrupt. Where these values are absent, corrupt leadership inescapable beckons. Since the decision to create and subsequently submit fake documents proceeds from a criminal mindset. This mode of thinking is indicative of the character at play. Once this understanding is taken to the realm of leadership and government, the logical continuum has to be that whoever engages in such dastardly enterprises, is indispensably poised to be corrupt. The nexus is clear: academia’s highest crime is directly linked to corruption. Drawing on a familial analogy, one can say fake certification is the cousin of corruption.

The Global Standard
This practice has become alarmingly common in South Africa. They have recorded an increase of 200% from 2009 to 2014 (Vitte&Makhubele ). As a consequence, this country has emerged as a standard-bearer for the crackdown on fabrication of qualifications. You can be reported to the South African Qualifications Authority if you publicly seek to make a false submission about your scholastic accomplishments. Also, South Africa has created the National Qualifications Framework Act (NQF) 67 of 2008. This statute allows for the ‘naming’ and ‘shaming’ of people who lie about their academic accomplishments and is designed to eradicate the scourge of illegal tertiary institutions. Above all, the legislation makes clear: those who engage in this practice can face up to five years in prison. Rightly so, this is a condign approach to deal with this issue. When one considers countries such as Guyana, South Africa is light-years away in this regard. Guyana has no significant and noteworthy legal consequence for the highest crime in academia and this situation is made even more egregious by the fact that we are smack down in the middle of national elections with one major party’s presidential candidate being accused of forging his academic qualifications at the degree level. If we were in sync with the global standard, the Guyana Elections Commission could have disqualified this candidate after a thorough investigation would have established there was indeed fraudulence.

Leadership and Academic Fraud 
In 2008, Herbal Life’s CEO Gregory Probert was forced to resign when it emerged that he did not have the MBA he claimed. In 2012, Scott Thompson, the CEO of Yahoo was put to shame when it was revealed that he had lied about having a degree in Computer Science.

Arapat Osipian reminded us, ‘…academic fraud is nothing new…some public officials have built their entire careers on the false pretence of scholastic achievement.’ He further noted the significant case of the German Minister of Defence, Baron Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Phillip Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiher Von und zu Guttenburg (there is no typo, this is his name), who was forced to resign when he plagiarised large sections of his ph.D. Dissertation comparing U.S. and European legal systems. An investigation by Brookings Institution alleges that Vladimir Putin copied about 16 pages of his 200-page ph.D. dissertation. It is further alleged that Vladimir Litvenenko, Putin’s academic adviser wrote the document. In the aforementioned cases, there was the commission of scholastic fraud at the level of exaggeration and plagiarism. In the case of Guyana’s presidential candidate, it is extremely ignoble due to the fact, it is alleged that the university claimed does not exist. While this shameful practice is the norm, once it meets leadership, the automatic response is either resignation or disqualification. It is never business as usual in the realm of leadership.