
Stealing Africa
Zambia holds the third-largest copper reserves on earth, yet 60 percent of its people live on less than a dollar a day and 80 percent are unemployed. Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen traces where the money actually goes, following the copper trade from Zambian mines to Rüschlikon, a Swiss village with one of the lowest tax rates in the country and, thanks largely to Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg, more municipal revenue than it knows what to do with. Built from public filings and financial documents, the film lays out how mining companies route profits through tax havens rather than paying royalties where the copper comes out of the ground, a pattern researchers estimate drains $160 billion a year from poor countries, nearly double what they receive in aid. Interviews with officials, industry figures, and Zambian workers fill in the human side of the arithmetic. The film is part of the Why Poverty series, and its case study makes a blunt point: the resource is real, the extraction is real, and the wealth still ends up somewhere else.