Addicted to Aid - Panorama - Sorious Samura
Monday 24th November 20:30 BBC1 Watch clip on YouTube
"It's not the quantity of aid we send to Africa that matters" says African journalist Sorious Samura "it's the quality of aid delivered."
Bafta and Emmy award winning journalist Sorious Samura has won his reputation for taking on tough assignments in Africa. Since his ground breaking 2000 film 'Cry Freetown' in which he risked his life to capture iconic footage of his own country's (Sierra Leone's) civil war his work has been characterised by his hard nosed and often provocative stance on the big issues of Africa; hunger, HIV/Aids, refugees, emigration and corruption.
Filmed in Uganda and Sierra Leone 'Africa - Addicted To Aid' shows that much western aid fails to help Africa's poorest.
Shock Treatment: He visits a showpiece hospital run by a well funded health department that looks like a warzone and yet in the nearby car park of the Ministry of Health there are dozens of new 4x4s for ministry staff.
Ticking Boxes: Thanks to western aid Ugandan schools and clinics have been built in record numbers. A remarkable achievement? Today, almost every Ugandan child has a place in primary school, but six out of ten can't read or write and over three quarters of teachers are not in the class-room when they should be.
Bad Governance: Western aid donors use African governments to distribute aid but time and time again Samura reveals how bad governance results in little or no aid getting to the poor. In Sierra Leone he reveals mosquito nets and drugs provided free by western donors to save children's lives are being sold in pharmacies. The Sierra Leone government Minister, ultimately responsible for the distribution is questioned by Samura:
Sorious: So why haven't you done something?
Minister: We set up monitoring teams?
Sorious: but children are still dying and this?.
Minister: Yes I know these people are fact and it is regrettable. They may have come from the medical stores and that, it is not government policy - the government does not encourage?
Sorious asks DFID's Africa Minister Ivan Lewis why donors are so uncritical of their African government partners. "Is it..." Sorious asks "because they're black"
Addicted to Aid - Panorama - Monday 24th November 20:30 BBC1
