As an IT professional that has lived in RSA and several other countries in the region, I have to say this is absolutely common place. Local industry giants wit

As an IT professional that has lived in RSA and several other countries in the region, I have to say this is absolutely common place. Local industry giants with preferred partner/solution provider status with <INSERT GIANT CORP HERE> will lobby and get F/OSS solutions knocked out of the running especially where public tenders are involved. They will of course then use the corrupt officials co-opted into this process to milk the budget for absurdly expensive solutions to non-existent problems. A long time ago, in a country I won't name, I was contracted to provide local support for the installations of PCs in rural schools. Upon turning up at the regional center, I had access to a warehouse with a gigantic stack of PCs to be delivered. I merrily went about installing them at every school locally. I've never had more fun or a better challenge, every installation was unique. One site needed a full solar installation because of proximity to a township where power theft was rampant meant electricity on the schools side was virtually never available. At another site, I teamed up with a local carpenter to build 30 simple desks and benches, leaving the hardware sitting on bare concrete floors seemed absurd. For seven months this went on, I never saw another contractor doing the same as I did, yet the pile of PCs diminished so I assumed there must be several others. I queried to find out who they were so we could coordinate, I didn't want to spend hours driving to a site only to find they'd already been. That never happened and I never did get a response. The problems begun when it came to more remote areas. Firstly there was significantly more hardware per student allocated for the rural areas, than urban areas, which was puzzling. Secondly I was not permitted to go and install them, I was told my fuel expenses wouldn't be covered. When I offered to waive those, I was told there was no point, because they would require upgrades shortly. The vendor advised we leave them another two months and they would have the service packs rolled out in the central storage site, then the hardware could be delivered. Their stated intention was to save the local govt money. How very noble. Over the course of the next month, that pile of undeliverable hardware diminished significantly as the various people from the purchasing process cashed in by selling it to local vendors on the cheap, some of it was probably re-exported. Who knows. Nobody cares, there was no investigation, that was over a decade ago - the entire process has probably repeated several times since then. It's absurd. It's arrogant. It's corrupt. It's ultimately detrimental to everybody involved and robs the most desperate of a resource that just might have lifted them out of poverty. It's Africa. Sorry for the ramble, I never can just explain how much I love and hate that place. Edit: spellin'