These days the words on the tip of our tongues are quarantine, social distancing, coronavirus and lockdown. Just a few short months ago, though, those words were white monopoly capital, state capture and corruption as we tried to make sense of a decade of the plunder and pillage of our state-owned enterprises by a corrupt president, his political cronies and a handful of select friends.
But even though our biggest enemy right now is a virus we cannot see, which could well wipe out tens of thousands of South Africans, film-makers Rehad Desai and Mark J Kaplan say what the Guptas and their accomplices did has a direct impact on the country’s ability to fight Covid-19.
With the Emmy-winning Miners Shot Down and One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival winner Everything Must Fall, Desai made the definitive documentaries on the Marikana massacre and #FeesMustFall respectively.
Now, in How To Steal A Country, co-directed by the multi-award-winning Mark J Kaplan (The Village Under The Forest), Desai turns his unflinching gaze to another defining moment in South Africa’s recent history: the rise and fall of the Gupta family.
As editor Ferial Haffajee puts it in the documentary, “They came here as traders. They sold shoes out of the boot of their car... And they left here as multibillionaires.”
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Desai’s take on how the little-known Indian family pulled it off is a suspenseful detective story uncovering one huge bribery scandal after another, reaching to the highest corridors of political power and into the boardrooms of several multinational corporations.
As investigative journalist Thanduxolo Jika says in the documentary, “It’s been almost 10 years of unabated looting. They estimate that it’s close to a trillion rand that the whole state capture debacle cost the country. A country that has got the highest unemployment rate, the highest rate of people who live in poverty. A trillion could have changed their lives.”
And now as we all face uncharted territory in our fight against a deadly virus, the film is more important than ever.
“The phrase ‘Never Again’ has resurfaced,” says Kaplan. “It signifies a very widespread abhorrence and sense of outrage towards something profoundly evil. That is how most South Africans feel about the looting of the fiscus, which is people’s money, during the Zuma years.
Rehad Desai
“It’s how many of us are reflecting on the impact of the corona pandemic that has exposed the fault lines in society so starkly that there seems to be no way forward without radical changes. The connection here is how can we hold our leadership to account, not just political leadership but also those in the corporate sector? All the elites, in other words.”
Desai agrees. “It’s a difficult time. Zero tolerance for corruption has to become the new normal - we have sacrificed much for the common good and will have to continue to do so. This will shift the rapacious nature of the South African elites and our economy.”
Kaplan says the film raises many questions. “It relates very directly to the times we are in. I think the film will stimulate people to reconsider their values, to imagine a better way for the sake of future generations. The film shows that it is possible to speak truth to power and why we must.”
Mark J Kaplan
Both Kaplan and Desai concede that How To Steal A Country was exceedingly hard to make. They started the process in 2017 and only finished production in January.
“This is an investigative piece with mountains of evidence,” Desai said. “Hard decisions had to be made about what’s left in and what’s left out. Many important voices of some of the whistle-blowers were left out - the real heroes.”
Kaplan agrees: “Corruption ran so deep and across so many sectors. What then to put in/leave out? Financing the film was also very complex.”
The film takes viewers back to the days Atul, Tony and Ajay Gupta first arrived in South Africa and how their targeted relationship with Zuma and his son, Duduzane, blossomed into a fully-fledged corrupt one, including having the final say on Zuma’s Cabinet appointments, before fleeing into luxurious exile in Dubai with the trillion rand they had fleeced from the state.
Scene frame grabs from the Gupta documentary How To Steal A Country by Rehad Desai and Mark Kaplan. Picture Supplied
Kaplan admits it felt risky embarking on this film when they did, before Zuma was ousted from the Union Buildings.
“It reminded me very strongly of the bad old days of using the camera to expose human rights abuses under apartheid. It eased up, of course, but our challenge was to find a compelling storyline that worked for South African audiences as well as international audiences for whom the issues and people involved were barely known.
“When the Zondo Commission entered the frame, this was both an opportunity and a challenge, for we never knew what was going to unfold. This ate into our budget and also had to be accommodated into the narrative weave. There are many people who made their voices heard as they stood up for our democracy, who unfortunately we could not fit into the documentary. We remain indebted to them all.
“This incident of state capture is becoming part of a new normal within the capitalist system worldwide. This type of accumulation has nothing to do with our liberation, rather the opposite. It will keep the dividends of democracy out of the hands of the mass of our people,” says Desai.
Kaplan says he hopes viewers realise that part of the Zupta project was to control the narrative.
Scene frame grabs from the Gupta documentary How To Steal A Country by Rehad Desai and Mark Kaplan. Picture Supplied
“They wanted to dismiss and discredit those who stood in their narrow, selfish way. To be, in other words, more critical of what they are told by people in power. And, to believe in their own voice and that a different outcome is possible, is necessary. That the only way forward, here and globally, is to forge links that are based on values that show care for one another and for the planet generally,” he said.
How To Steal A Country debuted on Showmax this week.