How to Steal A Country: Directed by Rehad Desai

How to Steal A Country is a bold South African documentary directed by the award winning film-maker Rehad Desai. Rehad is well known for the political documentaries he has directed in the past years such as Everything Must Fall which was produced during the #feesmustfall movement in 2018. His main focus is on historical and socio-political productions. How to Steal A Country is a story uncovering a huge corruption scandal involving the president Jacob Zuma and the Gupta brothers. The Gupta brothers came into South Africa to become multi-millionaires through the state funds and lucrative contracts.

South Africa has been experiencing corruption for many years that is caused by the top echelons with political power making decisions that help to not build but destroy the country. We are still under the same conditions as we can see how President Cyril Ramaphosa is running the country and making destructive deals during the current Covid-19 pandemic, putting us in serious danger. How to Steal A Country tells the real story on state capture and how this became a reality for the Gupta brothers, Jacob Zuma and everyone else directly benefitting from this.

Rehad Desai tells the story from the perspective of political, investigative journalists having been supplied with a hard drive filled with data on the state capture saga. The journalists and investigative journalism as a whole is perceived as whistle-blowers because they tell the story as it is with the evidence supplied via thousands of emails. Investigative journalists such as Susan Comrie, Thanduxolo Jika and Ferial Haffajee make this documentary more interesting and striking through their storytelling skills, the passion they have for journalism as well as their commitment to inform the public with news they need and deserve to know about their President and the state.

The audio and soundtrack is captivating, every sound is perfectly audible.There isn’t much camera movement, but where there is a move, it was dictated by the movement of the characters. The camera was kept still in the interview scenes, studying the characters and trying to get to know and understand them intimately. There are cues taken from the news to create an interesting style of storytelling and to show different evidences gathered on the story.

The significance of this documentary is to tell the true story about how deals were made for our country to be in the state in which it is in. The truth about how President Jacob Zuma sold us as a country to the Gupta brothers in the name of power and greed to all the state’s funds which were intended to better issues such as unemployment, water and electricity cuts, proper sanitation and so on. I think How to Steal A Country is an essential watch for all citizens of South Africa. Getting to know our country and its dealings is important so that we all know what our funds are being used for and how.

In conclusion, this documentary shows us how we as citizens do not entirely know what happens behind the closed doors of Presidency. Many ministers were fired during the state capture scandal for it to become a success and bring millions of rands into people’s pockets. The bottom line however is that, it is a brilliant and compelling documentary which tells nothing but the truth.