‘Assume fraud until genius is proven’ can help to end graft
What you need to know:
You wouldn’t think genius is rare in Kenya, though, if you read the news stories. It appears to be very common.
- You have fellows who just a few years ago were unknowns becoming billionaires overnight without delivering any value to anyone.
All this with no special skill or ability, without inventing, developing, producing or creating.
While going through the news stories of the past several weeks, my mind could not help but travel back in time over a decade to a country house on the outskirts of a small market town in Eastern Europe.
I was in a group selected from across the world had spent one very hot summer here, perfecting our skills in service of our chosen craft: Financial forensics. Catching and disrupting the schemes of economic saboteurs and terrorists (Corruption is economic terrorism).
GENIUS RARE
That hot day (it hit 40° C), the instructor took us through the paces, repeating an operating heuristic that has become one of my commandments. I can still hear his Germanic accent with the exaggerated “s” bellowing: “Always assume fraud until genius is proven”.
Indeed. These words came to my mind as I went through column after column in the newspaper reports of numerous corruption cases involving people whose crimes should have been evident the moment they made ostentatious public displays of unexplained wealth.
Assuming fraud until genius is proven means that, in every situation where you come across an individual, a corporation, any entity — whether natural or corporate, public or private — that repeatedly outperforms its peers day in, day out, never having a bad day, always displaying incredible success without a clear indication of its competitive advantage, you must assume that those involved are fraudsters, and the results come from deception, until you are presented with proof of their genius.
This heuristic has many implications. If you deal with one of the many preachers who promise guaranteed immense blessings if you “plant a seed”, chances are, unless he can prove supernatural abilities, he is a smooth-talking conman. If a corporation has left its peers in the dust for decades year in, year out without a radically different product or strategy, it is likely to be cooking the books.
NOBLE PRIZE
If a rock star stockbroker who always has his nose in all the right deals, chances are, he is an insider trader and not some genius possessed of unnatural intuition. Or a billionaire lawyer with their fingers in the most lucrative government tenders and never loses a case but possesses no discernible special ability or talent.
Nine times out of 10 you would win if you bet that they are corrupt and greasing the wheels of justice with bribes. It is hard to be that good.
You wouldn’t think genius is rare in Kenya, though, if you read the news stories. It appears to be very common. In every one of these cases, you have fellows who just a few years ago were unknowns vegetating in utter penury and about as well fed as a barber’s cat becoming billionaires overnight without delivering any value to anyone.
All this with no special skill or ability, without inventing, developing, producing or creating. If I may be sarcastic, I am surprised the Nobel Prize for Economics is not awarded to a Kenyan every year!
And when they are uncovered as nothing more than clinical mythomaniacs with the IQ of a mudfish and truth telling abilities of a carnival mirror, we pretend to be shocked and disappointed. It’s all feigned outrage and we convince no one, least of all ourselves.
HELICOPTERS
To end the charade of feigned outrage, I propose that we apply this heuristic in all circumstances: Until genius is proven, we must assume fraud and act accordingly.
When a suave, smooth-talking city slicker flies out to your village in a convoy of helicopters to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage, and you have no idea what he does for a living or how he made his wealth, just assume he is up to no good, end the negotiations and throw him out of your home. If not, let’s agree that you are an accomplice and the beneficiary of thievery, not a helpless victim of unimaginable trickery.
As the ancient legal maxim goes, Non decipitur qui scit se decipi (He is not deceived he who knows himself to have been deceived).
Mr Kuria is a risk consultant specialising in the detection, prevention and disruption of complex transnational financial crime. [email protected]
