The relative ease with which bogus Tiktok doctor Matthew Bongani Lani managed to convince scores of followers for years that he was a qualified health professional, raises the question of how many other fraudsters out there are dishing out medical advice to an unsuspecting public, writes MedicalBrief.
Lani, who was exposed as having no medical qualifications, was the picture of youthful achievement, confidently dispensing medical advice, and assuredly directing followers to purchase health products he marketed on his Tiktok channel, a Daily Maverick report says. Featured on national radio and TV channels, starring in a Gauteng Department of Health Youth Day advert, Lani had the world at his feet.
Yet within a month, that reality had been exploded. In its place: the rather pitiful sight of a young man bleeding from the lip being interrogated in the security offices of a Johannesburg hospital, apologising for entering the premises and denying he had ever claimed to be a doctor. That scene followed weeks of revelations progressively busting each lie Lani had told about his educational background and professional expertise.
But through it all, in what online commentators maintain was a display either of sheer brazenness or deep mental illness, Lani would return to make the same claim to his followers: He was telling the truth. Don’t believe everything you hear online. He was a real doctor, and his detractors were “haters” chasing online “clout”. There are still those who believe him – especially now that criminal charges against him appear to have collapsed.
Lani first seems to have surfaced in the public consciousness in 2021. He features in that year in an episode of the SABC3 human interest talk show Unpacked with Relebogile Mabotja, where Lani was interviewed in the guise of a psychology student at the University of Johannesburg with a shocking story – one in which Lani himself claimed to have been conned. The tale Lani told, which seems impossible to verify, is that a former partner had deliberately infected him with HIV as punishment for ending the relationship, and that Lani went on to successfully sue him in retaliation. (There appears to be no public record of this case.)
This TV appearance seems to have galvanised Lani’s aspirations to become a public figure. To commemorate World Aids Day in 2021, he could be heard on talk radio 702 as part of a feature called South Africans Doing Great Things. Here he was still posing as a psychology student: a “first-year intern clinical psychologist”, to be precise. On radio, he expressed his passion for educating his peers about HIV/Aids, in service of which he claimed to have established an NGO called Greater Than Aids Afrika. No records exist of this NGO being established as an actual entity.
Around this time, Lani also began to attempt to make money off his story, initially via crowdfunding. A first appeal, ostensibly for an HIV destigmatisation campaign, listed him once again as an “HIV/Aids prevention educator and an intern clinical psychologist”. When that bid failed to garner traction, Lani launched a new crowdfunding appeal in March 2022, claiming to be raising money to bulk-purchase sanitary supplies for young women.
Exactly when Matthew Lani made the transition from claiming to be a psychology student to claiming to be a Wits-trained junior doctor is unclear, but the driving motivation seems to have been the growth of his medical-themed TikTok account. Lani was a natural on the video-sharing platform, dispensing medical advice and extolling the virtues of the slimming pills he sold on the side.
The persuasiveness of Lani’s performance as a doctor rested heavily on props, costume and set. In his videos he was frequently wearing medical scrubs embroidered with his name. He often – too often, in retrospect – had a stethoscope draped casually around his neck. And perhaps most convincingly, he constantly filmed himself in and around Johannesburg’s Helen Joseph Hospital – ostensibly on ward rounds.
As Lani’s TikTok followers swelled to more than 200 000, however, questions began to mount. Indeed, as far back as 2021, social media user Gomolemo Seleke had attempted to raise the alarm, pointing out that some of the medical advice being given out by Lani was distinctly problematic.
One of the entities fooled by Lani has, in retrospect, caused special outrage: the Gauteng Department of Health. For Youth Day 2022, the department featured Lani in a since-deleted special video paying tribute to young medical professionals.
Lani might never have been exposed, were it not for the fact that his claims about his personal background grew increasingly bizarre and implausible. In recent months on TikTok, no longer satisfied with simply being a junior doctor, he slashed several years off his actual age in order to claim that he was also a prodigy who had skipped three grades at school and completed his medical school training at Wits in order to graduate by the age of 21.
In recent weeks, his story crumbled a little more day by day. The claims about where he earned his Matric and university degree were indisputably debunked by the relevant institutions. The Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), the Gauteng Department of Health and Helen Joseph Hospital all weighed in to confirm that Matthew Bongani Lani was not a registered doctor. But Lani, impossibly, almost impressively, doubled down.
Lani was merely a “TikTok name”, he said; he was registered with the HPCSA under his real name (which turned out to be that of another young doctor who has now laid identity theft charges). He didn’t have a Matric certificate, he said, because he had a high school diploma from “Cambridge University” (he doesn’t).
A week after being outed as fake, he was back on TikTok under a different name apologising for the delay in filling orders of his slimming products. After being arrested last weekend in action at Helen Joseph Hospital, authorities hoped to finally be rid of Lani – only for the NPA to declare the charges against him currently unwinnable.
In recent years, the USA has seen an epidemic of a particular kind of dishonesty. “Stolen valour” is the phenomenon – not unique to the US, but seemingly bizarrely prevalent there – in which people falsely claim a military record, or martial awards, which they did not actually earn.
If South Africa has an equivalent, it is surely “stolen expertise”: the phenomenon in which people falsely claim to have earned academic qualifications or experience in prestigious fields. It is impossible to know exactly how common this is, because there appears to be no central body keeping an eye on it. But every year, without fail, multiple public officials are exposed in this manner.
Medicine may be particularly prone to impostors – a terrifying thought given the consequences. But it is hard to know how else to interpret the announcement from Health Minister Joe Phaahla in June this year that 124 fake doctors had been arrested in South Africa since 2021: something like one per week, and that in itself only the result of a concerted recent campaign by the HPCSA in concert with SAPS.
In recent months, those arrested have been found fraudulently practising medicine everywhere from Kabokweni in Mpumalanga to Stellenbosch in the Western Cape. The accounts, contained in intermittent reports from the HPCSA, are like miniature short stories: “It was established that Ms Zikalala was consulting with members of the public, diagnosing them and prescribing medication to them, which they would then purchase from her health shop.”
Meanwhile, the whistle-blower who first exposed Lani finally feels vindicated, she says, after his dramatic fall recently from prolific social media “doctor” to criminally accused sham.
Seleke said she was insulted and humiliated online and from neighbours after she exposed Lani as a fraud in the town of Christiana, North West, in December 2020.
Seleke told News24 she eventually quit her job as a patient tracer for the North West Department of Health in 2021, after Lani secured a restraining order against her for attempting to expose him.
Lani and Seleke are both from Utlwanang township in Christiana, North West. Seleke first saw a post by him on Facebook in December 2020, in which he claimed to be a doctor at Christiana Hospital.
“I asked him on Facebook when he was appointed and which unit he was attached to. He claimed he was only working night shifts at the hospital,” Seleke said.
“I made the mistake by giving him my number. A few days later, he phoned, claiming his nephew was ill and he was taking him to Utlwanang Clinic, where I worked. He went there with a child, claiming it was his nephew.”
From the clinic, he posted pictures of himself in scrubs on Facebook, saying he was working at the clinic, Seleke said.
“Those pictures were suspicious. I alerted the nurses. They believed me. They confirmed seeing him at the clinic, sitting next to a boy.
“He was not wearing his scrubs at the time, but when nurses left the room to fetch medicine, Lani quickly put on scrubs and a mask, took pictures, and claimed he was working there,” she said.
“A nurse came with me to the police station to open a fraud case, but the police turned us back saying there was insufficient evidence.”
This did not deter Seleke, who accelerated her efforts to expose Lani by questioning all of his posts about being a doctor.
“But nobody believed me. They thought I was lying, and jealous of him.”
Lani, in turn, approached the Christiana Magistrate’s Court for a restraining order to prevent Seleke from “harassing” him on social media, she said.
On 31 March 2021, the court granted the order in which Seleke was ordered “not to intimidate, insult, threaten and not to verbally, emotionally and psychologically abuse” Lani.
“At the hearing, I pleaded with the court…I told them Lani was a fake. I even asked the court to ask him to produce his medical practice number… The court refused to listen to me.
“During the hearing, Lani changed (his) tune, saying he was not a doctor but a Wits medical student doing his internship in Christiana. The court believed him. I am happy Wits has since distanced itself from him.
“I was served with the restraining order. The court failed me. It failed to verify his qualifications or ask Lani to prove he was a medical student. I was treated as a person who was jealous of his achievements.”
Seleke was alone in her bid to expose Lani, despite her pleas for help from the provincial Health Department.
“I challenged every post, until he deleted his Facebook account. He then went on… TikTok, became unstoppable. People loved and followed his lies.”
She said his family in Christiana had also believed him.
“My greatest concern is patients he could have seen. He even advised people about critical medication on social media, including ARVs and PrEp.”
He deactivated his Facebook account in January 2021, the same time that Seleke started exposing him, moving to TikTok where he gained even more popularity.
Lani's lawyer, Dumisani Mabunda, claimed lying was not an offence. Mabunda added that Lani was considering suing the Gauteng Health Department after his arrest.
“He was treated like a criminal. He was only entertaining his followers on TikTok. Even if he were lying, lying is not a crime. It only becomes serious when you benefit financially,” the lawyer said.
Lani’s grandfather, Hendrik Swarts, said the family was shocked when they heard Lani had posed as a medical doctor.
“There is no way he studied medicine,” he said. “My grandson will never be a doctor.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
TikTok ‘doctor’ a free man after charges dropped
Bogus TikTok doctor charged by Gauteng Health
Hospital ‘pulmonologist’ with 2 surgeries among 18 bogus doctor arrests