I told you Donald

No sooner had I mentioned that Donald Trump was ignorant to ban people from some countries for fear of terrorism, than the story broke confirming my fears.

Diplomatic officials from a country not on his list, Venezuela, and clearly not meeting his criteria of potential terrorist source, had a racket going selling fake national documents to people some from countries on Donald's list. Iraq and Syria were mentioned.

It is nothing new, that corrupt officials take backhanders. Hollywood has created the impression that it is only the mafia that pays bribes and the police who take them. In the real world it is anyone with cash can pay bribes. Big corporations, intelligence agencies and, yes, terrorists often pay huge bribes.

In many developing countries, officials often openly extort small bribes from ordinary citizens for basic services. Such officials usually consider those approaching them with offers of large amounts of cash as a 'score'. What in Zimbabwean parlance we would call 'kubata mhene'. That roughly means catching a golden goose with your bare hands.

When people pay bribes, they do not announce their ultimate motive to those they are bribing. Nobody is going to approach an embassy or a national registry and announce, "Hey, I am a terrorist. Give me a fake document so that I can go bomb America". They will approach officials with very innocent sounding stories like "My uncle has found me a job in America, I need to go there quickly"

I am just giving these scenarios as an example. In the majority corrupt officials do not care a raindrop's chance in hell what the bribe payer is going to do with the documents. In fact, they may not see the ultimate recipient of the documents, but deal with pushers and middlemen.

The pushers may be runners tasked by the officials to find clients, or maybe cashing in on 'knowing the right people'. These middlemen mostly do not allow their 'clients' to be in contact with the officials they deal with. Knowing 'the right people' is high value intellectual property, so to speak.

Do not imagine that the officials taking bribes are just low ranking officials. It can be anyone up the command chain. In South Africa, Jackie Selebi was convicted of taking bribes when he was national police commissioner (the equivalent of FBI director). The CNN story suggests that people as high as a minister may be getting a cut from the sale of fake Venezuelan documents.

Also in South Africa the minister of defense was accused of smuggling a person illegally into South Africa on an official plane. Not to mention that the man now president has a friend who was convicted of paying bribes to him. Oh, what about the foreign wedding cortege that landed at the country's most secure airforce base.

Mind you when people take bribes, the official policy of they governments counts for nothing. All they want is the money. Sometimes they are socially engineered. Recent media stories mentioned how Nigerians often start affairs with civil officials so that they get close to an inside person.

In most developing countries, officials will take bribes faster than Donald Duck can say 'Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeez' in a cartoon. Excuse the pun. Countries that are economically stressed like Venezuela, are especially susceptible.

Donald Trump's immigration ban was drowning in naivete, even before it was floated.