It's impossible to do business in Africa without bribing people, all these laws do is put Western companies at a tremendous disadvantage compared to Chinese ones.
In my first real job about a decade ago, I asked the APAC/China rep why the prices were 30-40% higher... "The hookers and bribes tax. Hookers and bribes"
> impossible to do business in Africa without bribing people
Why?
> all these laws do is put Western companies at a tremendous disadvantage
While attempting to address a serious problem. You could say this of any law.
> compared to Chinese ones.
Not a standard I care about or am willing to be held hostage to. Moral sacrifice to capture international business is pretty gross. Probably why it wasn't even hard to pass the law.
The explanation I've heard before is that when you need anything from a thoroughly corrupt government, as simple as a building permit or a visa for a foreign employee involved in a project, officials will simply not process your request without a bribe. They believe it is owed. End of story.
I don't like the explanation in the slightest. But I do see how it might shut down opportunity if you can't overpower the obstacles, and aren't willing to bribe.
The utility of US laws against bribing foreign officials is to break down the expectation by those officials of a bribe. But, from a game theory point of view, if China is willing to bribe, this becomes much less effective.
The same happens in Latin America as well. If you want to get through the layers of bureaucracy without being stuck for years in a process, you have to pay up. And it has to be a well-connected government official. That’s mostly the reason I don’t bother with anything entrepreneurship related here.
Because there is no mechanism in basically all of Africa that would put some kind of limit on it. No strong governmental institutions, no moral framework, no religious framework. And to the contrary, the African continent is largely antithetical to western/European moral, ethical, and philosophical limitations.
People just assume Africans are the same as Europeans and Asians, etc. because they’ve had it hammered into their minds all their lives, but reality is that we are all quite different and that’s good in some ways and bad in others, but it’s different.
Err totally wrong the entire north Africa has strong religious frameworks, and take Egypt as an example of a powerful government. Plenty of other places too.
I knew I should specify sub-Saharan Africa, because there’s always that Reddit tier knowing and willful idiot contrarian that just can’t help themselves from just being opposite for sake of being opposite, due to a severe mental derangement that compels them to be that way.
We are not talking about North Africa here, we are talking about South Africa and South Africa like places, which would mean sub-Saharan Africa, not Egypt or Algeria or Tunisia. You lack refinement and do not contribute anything useful, and may want to reflect on why you have that contrarian compulsion. No one is talking about North Africa. All the intelligent people here know we are talking about Africa in the context of South Africa. You clearly lack fundamental skills to distinguish such things.
to my christmas list. I don't think the law or war are appropriate tools for establishing international morality, but maybe the right ones are somewhere in these.
US oil companies like ExxonMobile have survived on the international market just fine, despite the laws preventing them handing out bribes for the past several decades.
There are several examples of bribes being publicized and the guilty company losing out on big contracts as a result (e.g. from ECHELON spying).
Yeah, I have a friend who worked in South-East Asia for a while - he said that his company paid "agents" whose job was specifically to pay the bribes on behalf of his company so that they themselves wouldn't get in trouble for paying the bribes.
