True. I once worked on a road projevct in Tanzania funded by the Millenium Challenge Corporation and the contractor was a Danish-Dutch consortium.
The "engineers" they brought from both countries were basically street technicians. Most were Dutch washing machine repair men pretending to be engineers and stole everything including parts and fuel and would go AWOL for days. We fired them all. Only one man in the whole project was doing anything. I remember catching one of them stealking fuel and he tried to suggest that he can't have been stealing because he was European. Kicked his butt.
The project consumed 1 Million Euro a week with absolutely no progress whatsoever. The most incompetent and corrupt bunch of people imaginable. That 100 km section took years to finish. It went on for another 3 years after we left. The next segment was Chinese built and took less than 14 months to finish everything.
However, this is merely incidental to the main issue which is that even when Chinese corporations are used they are still corrupt and pay kickbacks. If anything we caught the Dutch and Danes because fundamentally corruption was accepted as bad not merely as a way of doing business.
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