A sweeping look at the big political events of recent years in South Africa…
How to Steal a Country

“It's been almost 10 years of unabated looting.” — Investigative journalist Thanduxolo Jika
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.
“This is a devastating reminder of greed, complicity and the outright theft of a nation’s resources.” —City Press
Citation
Main credits
Desai, Rehad (film director)
Desai, Rehad (film producer)
Desai, Rehad (screenwriter)
Kaplan, Mark (film director)
Desai, Zivia Keiper (film producer)
Khanna, Anita (film producer)
Khanna, Anita (screenwriter)
Other credits
Editors, Megan Gill [and 3 others]; directors of photography, Nic Hofmeyr, Duncan Tilley.
Distributor subjects
Communication
Economics, Economic Sociology
Ethics (Business)
Government
Journalism
Media Studies
Politics
Political Science
Sociology (Economic)
Keywords
Related Films
Can a diverse group of college kids find common ground with their school’s…
The story the 2012 miner's strike in South Africa, where police opened…