Is Nigerian creator of the Internet or a fraud?

If you were going to say the Nigerian-born Philip Emeagwali, then skip to the head of the class.

Mr Emeagwali was born to a poor family in 1954.

His father was quick to recognise that his son had a special gift, he was able to process mathematical equations at speeds that were daunting to the grown-ups around him.

But despite of his talent, the young maths whiz had to drop out of school because of poverty.

Nonethless, he managed to attend some of the world’s most prestigious educational facilities—including the University of London, George Washington University and the University of Maryland, and later earned a doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan.

Dubbed the fastest man on earth due to his mental prowess, the technology king is a self-proclaimed father of the Internet.

His Connection Machine invention is said to have the genesis of the internet as we know it today.

A 1980s discovery by Mr Emeagwali revealed that programmed microprocessors in computers could talk to each other at the same time — a basic tenet of the working of the internet.

Time magazine says that the success of this record-breaking experiment meant that there was now a practical and inexpensive way to use machines like this to speak to each other all over the world.

“Within a few years, the oil industry had seized upon this idea, then called the Hyperball International Network creating a virtual world wide web of ultrafast digital communication,” the magazine wrote in 2007.

The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet.

Since then, he has won more than 100 prizes for his work and Apple computer has used his microprocessor technology in their Power Mac G4 model.

Today he lives in Washington with his wife and son.

But others have disputed the high-flying achievements.

Some, like the Sahara Report, say that none of Mr Emeagwali’s lofty claims, on whose strength he has curried favour and recognition from gullible and hero-hungry black people, is true.

Researchers claim that despite being hailed by academics, the media (including the BBC, Ebony and Essence magazines) and his country as the father of the internet, Mr Emeagwali is a figment of the very same internet he claims to have created.

They accuse him of massaging the internet in order to validate fraudulent claims about himself.

The moral of the lesson then on this Mashujaa day then, is to vet your heroes thoroughly, for behind the highfalutin claims may stand a fraud.