It's astonishing there's no bare bones citizen by investment scheme in sub Saharan Africa. Given the corruption and access to Rwanda and Kenya it seems like an obvious easy money printer.
I'd live in Rwanda or Kenya over ~2/3rds of other countries. Certainly over anywhere in the Middle East, North Africa, the nation of South Africa, Central America, etc.
Everyone I know that's gone absolutely loves it, and every Kenyan I've worked with has been a lovely person.
There's a shitty "meme" that Africa is just a huge, hot version of Detroit or St. Louis or other Black American city. It's absolutely not, those classes of areas have remarkably different issues.
You sound like someone who has never been in northern africa or central america. Plenty of areas there that are clean, urbanist, and wealthy, way more than in Kenya or Rwanda.
You could do a lot worse than Rwanda if you were fleeing Russia or the West Bank or something. Usually CBI are investment only in name, they're seen as a total loss.
Rwanda has an HDI of 0.545 and this is suspect as well because they have been found to be fudging poverty and GDP metrics
Even Gaza under occupation had a HDI of 0.699 (roughly comparable to Vietnam). The West Bank regions are roughly comparable to neighboring Jordan around 0.710-0.730.
Even most Pakistanis, Afghans, and Syrians have better options in their home country from an economic standpoint.
Russia itself has almost reached a threshold around "Developed" with an HDI around 0.824.
I never meant to imply Rwanda is better than the aforementioned on a general level. When you are legitimately fleeing rather than economically migrating though that typically means your individual HDI of sorts was already near zero. It doesn't make much sense to use population HDI of origin for such persons.
I've been helping a couple Afghan translators stuck in Afghanistan to get their families into the US. They are all staying put in Kabul or Ghazni until the US processes their visa, and are looking at Pakistan, Saudi, and India as backups in case they need to book it and leave.
They sure as hell aren't going to uproot their lives to end up in another country at a similar developmental level but with no safety net in the form of family if network nor enough relevant jobs nor the relevant language skills
On top of that, there are waaaay better options in general. If you're in WB and want to flee, it's relatively easy to go to Jordan. As a Gazan it is obviously difficult right now with the war, but even before that Gazans who would emigrate abroad (as refugees or immigrants) had a path in Jordan (27% of Jordan is Palestinian), Saudi (1% of Saudi is Palestinian), Qatar (5% of Qatar is Palestinian), and Egypt, which isn't as great as Europe but is definitely better and easier to survive in than Rwanda
It's the same reason Australia opened camps for asylees in Papua New Guinea and Narau - by building a hell on earth they are showing you shouldn't even try apply for asylum.
There are 55k Palestinians diaspora in Yemen and that has an even worse HDI than Rwanda. The number of fallacies you've presented I'm starting to lose track. You've used anecdote of an afghan family, general population HDI of origin to measure subpopulations fleeing, you said "not really" to a statement that you could do worse but then did the opposite and instead argued that there were other better possible choices (I never denied this).
It's baffling that you're so dismissive some could use the option, particularly when circumstances and wealth and connections often dictate where you can flee. Low HDI Comoros (now discontinued ) and Vanuatu have CBI programs that have sold tens of thousands of passports to stateless and others in bad situations in the third world ( most of whom have no chance at US visa), despite in theory with the right means other options being better.
The market case is well established, frankly I suspect it's only a matter of time until these incentives open up such doors again in these regions.
Making corruption official is problematic. First off, making the practice official makes pricing a lot more transparent. If a country just outright says "no-questions-asked visas for $1000, citizenship for $10,000" then that also means the immigration control officer can't demand $2000 bribes to someone who can't meet the official immigration rules.
Furthermore, one of the advantages of widespread corruption is that everyone has to do it, which means everyone can be prosecuted for it. You could, say, require political candidates to pay million-dollar bribes, and then if those candidates actually get popular enough to threaten your power, prosecute them for bribing themselves onto the ballot. If everyone's a criminal, it doesn't mean the crime isn't a crime. It means you can strip people of their rights at any time without question.
If corruption were made official, this goes away. Someone who bought a golden visa or passport can't be prosecuted if the procedure for buying it was on the books and above-board - even if it's priced like some kind of "Sybil-resistant" anarchocapitalist cryptocurrency hellscape of humans-as-piles-of-money.