A real doctor's name, a forged Makerere MBBS and a forged transcript: the Kampala "Dr Ssemanda" case, and how the genuine Dr Ssemanda got his identity back

The simplest way to pass a registry check is to be, on paper, someone who is already on the registry. A Kampala case from late 2024 shows how that works and how it ends.

According to the Daily Monitor, a 38-year-old man charged in court under the name Ken Nyombi, and said to have used the aliases Innocent Ssemanda, Samuel Alfred Teriyeitu and Fred Ssendi, was remanded on charges of forging academic documents. Prosecutors said he had forged a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degree and an academic transcript in the name of Ssemanda, purporting them to have been issued by Makerere University. The real Dr Innocent Ssemanda, allAfrica and Nile Post reported, was the person who exposed the impersonation after discovering that someone was practising under his name and credentials, and was described as relieved when the accused was further remanded. Nile Post's two-part series went through how the identity had been used.

The case belongs beside the Japanese case elsewhere on this site, where a Tokyo impostor also borrowed a real physician's identity from the internet. In both, the register was correct; the person was wrong. The failure was at the point of hiring, where nobody matched the face and the file to the registry entry and asked the university to confirm the degree.

Two things follow for students. The first is to guard your own documents. Scans of a degree, a transcript and a registration certificate, handed to an agent or uploaded to a job portal, are exactly what an impersonator needs, and several cases on this site involve originals or copies held by third parties. The second is that when you verify a doctor, a college or an agent, verify the person as well as the name: the registry entry, the photograph, the university's own confirmation. Dr Ssemanda was real. The problem was that for a while there were two of him.