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I've heard the same joke, but during the first visit the South Korean official points at a nearby busy highway and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 10%", and during the second visit the African official points at a nearby untrammeled stretch of jungle and says "for every 1000 $ spent on that highway, I took 100%".
I mean, it's even more sophisticated than that.
Like, take Nancy Pelosi. Her family obviously has become fabulously wealthy off corrupt insider trading. And yet, to the best of my knowledge she's never taken money direction out of the public coffers. If anything it's been a "rising tide lifts all boats" type scenario where she knows a company is going to have their regulatory burden eased, possibly by her input, so her husband buys a fuck ton of call options. All the other investors in the company win, the people working for the company win, everyone relying on that company performing a valuable economic function wins, and of course the Pelosi's win. This is night and day from a scenario where the party that's been running South Africa just nakedly loots the funds for maintaining the power grid, and now they risk complete grid collapse after decades of neglect.
Expanding on your thought, Pelosi’s approach is also superior because the victims are far less sympathetic. The press and general public have no particular love for whatever bank or hedge fund sold those calls. Whereas the ANC’s victims are the general public.
I mean, there are downsides. It distorts capital markets, it picks winners and losers, if they do the same shit with shorts (buying tons of puts and then launching a government investigation on a company) it could be incredibly destructive. If part of it is regulatory capture, it basically grants monopoly/duopoly status to chosen companies, and then things gradually get worse.
That said, all that corruption is still better than African corruption. If smart corrupt leaders are constantly trying to figure out what is the most corruption they can get away with, while still performing their ostensible job duties, the system is still "working". If dumb corrupt leaders just go "LOL, what if I stole all of it?" because high time preference, we get the 3rd world.
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