How To Get Ahead In Africa

BAFTA Award-winning journalist Sorious Samura shows how in Africa corruption has become normal and accepted, even though it's tearing the continent to pieces. Despite the billions in western aid poured in, Samura claims Africa is heading into oblivion: but it's not war, famine and disease strangling development; it's corruption.

Dispatches provides a sober portrait of how modern Africa really works, where the voiceless millions, living in poverty, have had their futures stolen by their corrupt governments, aided and abetted by the West.

Samura moves into one of the largest slums in Africa, Kibera in Kenya, to reveal the relentlessness of everyday corruption, where the poor have to bribe just to survive: for hospital appointments, building shacks, getting work and staying out of jail. Western development aid pours into this environment. No one knows how much Western development aid money becomes corrupted but it doesn't seem to matter because it still comes anyway.

Samura returns home to Sierra Leone to live with Mama Queen and her 10 children. Here widespread corruption led to a brutal and bloody civil war that ended in 2002. The country had the chance to start again but Samura reveals how a seven-year aid project, led by the British, has failed because of corruption and a lack of understanding from Western donors. There is no water or electricity and Sierra Leoneans still have the worst life expectancy on the planet. Mama Queen's nine-year-old son has to bribe his teaches just to be taught.

Samura claims that, in many parts of Africa, school is a place where children are taught to bribe and to use power and status to get what they want.

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