I worked briefly for a startup that wanted a .sy domain. That's Syria. They had to get the State Dept. involved (Hillary Clinton had to sign one of the documents, she was Sec. of State at the time.) The package they sent to Syria was a kind of Matryoshka doll: a package with some grease (cash!) and another package inside, that in turn had the grease for the next level of the bureaucracy and another package for them to pass on, which contained more grease and another package... All in all four or five layers of payments and bureaucracy. They got the domain name but then abandoned it for some reason I don't know (I suspect it was just more trouble than it was worth to have "foo.sy" and deal with Syrian government rather than just "foosy.com".) US$20,000 down the drain. FWIW this was all official enough that it wasn't legally bribery.

It is not limited to Africa. First world countries like to call it with a different name: lobby.

And in many other parts of the world. It is so bad that businesses in n the US did adopt it as a practice. The ballooned to such epic porportions that the US Senate sponsored a bill to make it in illegal. If it had been kept down to a mild roar the law would still be missing from the books.

It is still bad because the incentives are still in place. Throw a little bit of money at a few people, get your business locked in. If you get caught you pay a very small portion of the profits and get to keep your business deal in place.

The fines are a joke, and the rules are indeed for the little people.

That's an essential part of it.

"We ordered them to not accept bribes! Never mind that we also ordered them to somehow convince these governments to run licensed copies of Windows instead of cracked copies, and since it costs them money while buying them nothing, the only way it could possibly be done is bribery. It's not our fault because we told them not to!"