How to Steal a Country
"It's the Economy, Stupid!"
•
1h 33m
Directed by Rehad Desai, co-directed by Mark Kaplan • Documentary • 2020 • 87 minutes
[02/05/2025: Anyone see the NYT article today "What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans." ? Here's a doc thriller about what went on in South Africa not so long ago!]
HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY opens like a classic thriller, with investigative journalists meeting anonymous whistleblowers in a parking garage. There, they receive a hard drive filled with hundreds of thousands of explosive files and emails implicating Jacob Zuma’s South African government in a massive corruption scandal.
Director Rehad Desai (Everything Must Fall, Miners Shot Down) chronicles how the three Gupta brothers, once small-scale peddlers, cultivated relationships with Zuma and other ANC figures, and parlayed them into massive profits. The brothers were involved in everything from a US$100 billion nuclear deal with Russia, to graft at the state-owned railway and power companies. Tens of millions were stolen from money earmarked for rural development and funneled into a lavish Gupta family wedding. Journalists investigating this corruption were targets of a disinformation campaign accusing them of being neo-colonialists supporting white monopoly power.
Eventually, the journalists are vindicated, and a state inquiry is called into “state capture”—a massive corruption scheme involving the Guptas, Zuma and his government, and international finance and consulting firms.
HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY serves as a warning on how multinational companies and ruthless entrepreneurs can co-opt democracies for their own profit.
Up Next in "It's the Economy, Stupid!"
-
Time Thieves
Directed by Cosima Dannoritzer • Documentary • 2018 • 85 minutes
Who hasn’t come across the situation where an airline has us printing our own boarding passes and checking in our own luggage, saving the company a fortune in working hours? Who hasn’t spent hours assembling a piece of furniture, o...
-
Family Business
Directed by Tom Cohen • Documentary • 1982 • 90 minutes
Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.
Howie Snyder is an archetype: a retired Marine colonel in his mid 40s, he is an American entrepreneur struggling to make his business succeed.
Howie's Shakey's Pizza franchise in Muncie, Indiana em...
-
As Goes Janesville
Directed by Brad Lichtenstein • Documentary • 2012 • 87 minutes
As Goes Janesville catapults viewers to the front lines of a national debate over the fate of the American economy and the survival of the middle class – a debate that turned into a pitched battle in the normally tranquil state of W...
