Just over two weeks ago, the BBC reported the Ugandan clinics are selling fake HIV-negative certificates to help people get jobs.

There was a lot of outraged discussion on the web about the scandal. However, bogus HIV certificates are by no means the worst forgery scams around. In Kampala, Nairobi, Lagos, and many other African cities, there are people in parliament, even governors, who faked their degree certificates.

In our part of the world, you can get a fake court order or fake house title, not to mention a fraudulent presidential victory in an election, very easily.

It is all terrible and immoral yes, but if one looks at the big picture, what is most disappointing about these scams is their small-mindedness.

Take the Chinese, who are accomplished fraudsters and forgers in their own right. They forge passports, ivory export certificates, currency and all types of documents, but they also do the big stuff. They produce fake Ferraris, fake smartphones, fake computers, even fake aeroplanes.

Therefore, when it comes to crime, where you would think the imagination of crooks, irrespective of their nationality, would be equal, African scammers generally tend to be less ambitious.

A criminally minded African hacker will only try to steal from one bank… his Hong Kong counterpart will try and steal from all the world’s banks.

Measuring African scams against those in other parts of the world is important, as it tells you a lot about the continent’s competitiveness, because by its nature the usual barriers to trade don’t stand in the way of crime.

Taxes should not be prohibitive for smugglers, for example, because smugglers don’t pay tax. The state of a country’s infrastructure shouldn’t impact too much on a criminal, because he stays off the smooth tarmac roads and uses rugged bush paths.

A police roadblock shouldn’t be too much of a problem for a drug baron, because the police are probably his employees. And the cost of electricity shouldn’t be prohibitive for someone who is making fake mineral water or beer, because he would be “tapping” the electricity and not paying for it.

For these reasons, how Africa steals and scams, reveals more about its future economic prospects than how it trades legitimately in the world.

The day you hear Apple or Samsung complaining that their smartphones are being forged in the backstreets of Kampala, Nairobi, or Dar, know that Africa’s century will have arrived and its time to rush in and invest.

This is where our Nigerian brothers and sisters stand apart. Nigerians are world famous for their e-mail scams, more popularly known as 419s. They have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the world since the Internet came of age in the late 1990s through these 419 frauds.

Nigerian criminals have shown a global ambition that is not common in the rest of the continent.

Recently, after nearly 24 years, the Nigerians recounted the value of their economy. The economists call it “rebasing gross domestic product.” Turns out it is the richest country in Africa, as it overtook South Africa. Nigeria rightly deserves to be leader of Africa.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]. Twitter: @cobbo3