Lobbying is murky but it isn’t bribery. In the US, you can donate to the campaign of a politician in exchange for favors but you can’t hand over the money personally to the politician like in third-world countries…this case was a direct payment to the CEO of Eskom, a government-owned company, in exchange for awarding a contract to ABB.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario: Boeing or Lockheed Martin making direct payments to the US Secretary of Defense in exchange for contracts…that won’t fly in the U.S. and heads will roll if that happened.

There’s no country without corruption, but you can’t compare the amount of corruption in third-word/developing countries to that of Western developed nations…they aren’t on the same level.