Of aura-farming and fraud! — by Folorunso Adisa
It didn’t surprise me to see the barrage of complaints levelled against Mr. Stephen Akintayo by his erstwhile staff. In one of my earliest pieces in my column for The Punch Newspapers, titled “Sujimoto’s Foundation of Sand” (link in the comment section), I wrote at length about the public defence mounted for Sujimoto by Stephen Akintayo, another prominent figure in Nigeria’s real estate theatre. I noted then:
“The debate did not end with Ogundele’s video. Stephen Akintayo, another real estate player, waded in, lamenting that Nigerians were being too hard on Sujimoto. He likened the matter to a $50 million business loss, suggesting it was nothing more than the usual turbulence of entrepreneurship.
That such a defence came from Akintayo is telling. He has himself been dogged by fraud allegations, with victims alleging property scams and unfulfilled land sales. His intervention read less like solidarity among entrepreneurs than a pact among embattled reputations. The deeper tragedy, however, was the applause he received. Many Nigerians in the comments nodded along, dismissing fraud allegations as mere business ‘challenges.’ This casual acceptance of ethical erosion is, perhaps, the greater crisis.”
Time has only sharpened the relevance of that moment. Like the Sujimoto saga, Stephen Akintayo’s story is not just about one businessman or one controversy. It is about the moral choices a society repeatedly makes when charisma is allowed to outrank character. It is about how we confuse visibility with credibility, and confidence with competence.
In recent years, a new economy has flourished alongside legitimate enterprise. It is the economy of aura. Here, mentorship is marketed as spectacle, success is performed rather than proven, and wealth is announced before it is examined. Social media has made it easy to cultivate gravitas without scrutiny, to don the robes of authority without passing through the discipline of accountability. In this space, fraud does not always arrive wearing a mask. Sometimes, it arrives giving motivational speeches, selling “access,” and baptising ambition with borrowed legitimacy.
This is where the real danger lies. Not only in the act of deceit itself, but in the crowd that claps for it. When fraud is repeatedly reframed as “business setbacks,” when allegations are dismissed as envy, and when every critic is branded a hater, a society quietly lowers its ethical floor. We begin to excuse what should alarm us. We begin to normalise what should provoke outrage.
The questions, then, are unavoidable. Will we excuse deception because the accused once dazzled us with marble floors and champagne towers? Will we normalise fraud simply because the speaker shares our language, our faith, or our social aspirations? Or will we insist, however imperfectly, that integrity remains non-negotiable?
Because nations, like individuals, are built not only on ambition but on character. And where character is absent, success becomes theatre. The towers may rise quickly, but they are hollow. And hollow towers, no matter how grand, always collapse at the first serious tremor of scrutiny.
