My PH told me of things in RSA. Had a new term for them-TERMITES.
As an American its very hard to understand the mind of the African because it is so different. Here, the default setting is to tend to the needs of your family, your town, your State, your American citizen, and depending on bent thereafter it would be worldwide comrades (e.g. human race, your religion, your ethnicity in diaspora, whatever)
Every once in a great while we find someone that was literally treasonous to the cause of the American way, enriching themselves for the benefit of an enemy of the west/good/ethical/American. When we catch those people, beyond the financial and criminal consequences, they are persona non grata in society. Not at their country club, their fraternity, their civic organizations, their trade association, their town....they are dead to the world.
The above is how an American thinks, so we overlay that on Africa and assume there is a logical similarity but it isn't so. There is a disproportionate pressure on an African to employ and gift his family and tribe patronage jobs and money even if there is no justification, thus they are anti-American in that they do not value meritocracy. Contrast that to America where many fathers fire their own kin if they are not cutting it at the family business. (or buy them out, or transfer them to a job they actually have qualifications)
Expanding the circle wider in Africa, there is no concept of Statehood or the "American way" where we want all our citizens to do well. There is no moral infraction for taking a bribe that destroy's the fabric of an African State, or that harms your fellow citizen, particularly if they are Matebele and you're Tonga, or they're Tonga and you're Shona. Artificial borders created by white colonials do not make you brothers in Africa, they are simply other species competing against you in a zero-sum game mentality. They collectively have no shame in undermining their own society if they can be personally enriched, a bonus if others suffer if you take it all first.
Which brings us to the other issue of sub-saharan Africa related to suffering and cruelty. In virtually every language of sub-saharan Africa there is no native word for cruelty. It is such a foreign concept that in almost all their languages, they had to borrow the word from Dutch or English because they never had need to describe cruel behavior.
The last problem is that a durable contract is what builds a society. Long before the Magna Carta and the US Constitution, the Christian-European principle of a firm handshake was a binding contract. The west and the Abrahamic religions have had a concept of a contract, a promise, a pledge, a vow, or other similar concepts that allow us to shake hands and do right by the other party, our community, or our country. That doesn't even exist linguistically in sub-saharan Africa. The words promise, pledge, vow, obligation, and other words were all borrowed modern words inserted into their languages by European colonials. All of them ultimately are interpreted "to make an attempt", "to try", etc. You can imagine how this becomes a problem if you're taking an oath as a public servant, a soldier, a politician, a man of the cloth, or simply trying to negotiate a verbal contract.
All of these differences result in self-dealing at the fiber and fabric of sub-Saharan Africa. The abandonment of colonialism has created a vacuum where the natural tendencies of the "might makes right" indigenous are the normative case. This is why it is so easy for the Chinese to conquer the world with their new "Silk road" initiatives. A few million dollars bribe can get virtually any African politiician to approve a Sovereign debt loan to build something the African does not need or want with a loan terms that the African State can never repay. For example in Tanzania a few bribes resulted in a Sovereign loan from China to build the railroads and of course a default by the State on those loans. Forever, in perpetuity, all goods and services by rail in Tanzania are now within the control of the Chinese. This is the same for mineral rights and other forestry/mining interests throughout Africa, but especially in the SADC (the southern nations). The Chinese continue to offer petty bribes to corrupt people willing to sell out their race/town/country, and in turn the Chinese quickly call the loans and nationalize that portion of Africa's economy forever. The Chinese are doing this elsewhere in places like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, but no place as much as Africa because the culture and morality allows it to be so effective for so cheap.
Meanwhile the west has abandoned colonialism and we do not have western organized governments left in Africa (may Rhodesia rest in peace) so the west is asleep at the wheel, watching our enemies buy up the planet for pennies.
When I was a kid I thought the whites in Africa were racists because they refused the one-man, one-vote demands out of hatred for other races. Excepting Apartheid South Africa, the rest of the region wasn't actually racist, they understood that there was cultural development that had to happen and an overwhelming respect for Judeo-Christian values and love of country that needed to develop before you turn over the power of mob rule to people that will sell each other out for pennies, sometimes just for the sake of causing suffering in others in their own country.
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