SA’s bloated, money-guzzling, incompetent and collapsing state-owned enterprises will not be fixed without pain. There will be pain for workers like those at Eskom, because there is no way you can fix that entity without shedding jobs. There will be pain for ordinary South Africans and owners of small and large businesses because you cannot fix Eskom’s power supply without the load-shedding we are currently experiencing.
There will be a lot of pain for a long time. This does not apply to just Eskom. The SA public service is bloated, incompetent, inefficient and way too expensive. It has to be trimmed or else government finances will remain a risk to the country. There will be pain.
It is becoming clear that, while many South Africans are ready to go through pain so that the country can be fixed, Ramaphosa and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan are not.
There is nothing that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team can do to fix this broken country without inflicting and enduring the pain that is needed. Yet it is becoming clear that, while many South Africans are ready to go through pain so that the country can be fixed, Ramaphosa and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan are not.
Nothing illustrates this better than the comical statements that came from the presidency and Gordhan about SAA on Friday. After the business rescue practitioners’ arrival, the airline announced last week that it would cancel all domestic flights, except for a reduced service between Johannesburg and Cape Town, as well as some international and regional flights in a bid to slash its enormous costs.
Ramaphosa and Gordhan expressed unhappiness, saying they would make “representations” to the new airline leaders to “balance the necessity for trimming unprofitable routes with the need to ensure the future sustainability of both the airline and SA’s aviation industry”.
“We want to find out what the rationale is. We want to have a discussion with them because SAA is not only a great symbol for the country but also an economic enabler.”
This is political twaddle. They want to take your money and pour it down the throats of their cronies at SAA. They should not be allowed to get away with it.
SAA is a disaster. Bloated, inefficient and corrupt for years, it was the epicentre of the looting and corruption of the Jacob Zuma presidency. Just last week we heard at the Zondo commission from former CEO of the airline, Vuyisile Kona. He spoke about being escorted to the Gupta den of corruption at Saxonwold to meet the family by former minister Malusi Gigaba’s adviser.
To fix SAA you will have to endure pain. You will have to cut routes. You will have to let people go. You will have to pare down costs. You will have to grit your teeth and hold on tight. It’s not a joyride.
Who was there? Duduzane Zuma, Tshepiso Magashule (son of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule), Gigaba’s adviser Siyabonga Mahlangu and Tony Gupta. Kona says they offered him R100,000 in cash. He refused the money. Meanwhile, we have also been hearing how Zuma associate Dudu Myeni got up to all sorts of mayhem at SAA.
If it weren’t for the taxpayer annually pouring billions into SAA it would have collapsed ages ago. In December, when things had reached absolute crisis, SAA went into business rescue.
Billions of taxpayer money had been wasted on it. As if that’s not enough, a few weeks ago it received a R3.5bn “loan” from the Development Bank of Southern Africa. It is sniffing that up its nose at a horrific rate as we speak.
To fix SAA you will have to endure pain. You will have to cut routes. You will have to let people go. You will have to pare down costs. You will have to grit your teeth and hold on tight. It’s not a joyride.
The business rescue practitioners clearly know that this has to be done. Of course there would be unhappiness. If this were a walk in the park everyone would be doing it. The trade unions are moaning — as they were always going to despite the fact that they went on strike in November 2019 to demand unsustainable pay hikes.
So, what is needed here is not the politically expedient decision-making that Ramaphosa and Gordhan are engaging in. The worst thing Ramaphosa ever did for Eskom was to rush to Megawatt Park whenever there was load-shedding. He should not have gone there last December. The board had repeatedly told him that power stations needed servicing. He should have let them run the place, not rush to instruct them that there would be no load-shedding until mid-January, for example.
This is the same mistake that he and Gordhan are making now at SAA by calling for a review of the decision to close down routes. Once again, political considerations are trumping sound economic reasoning.
No one is going to be negatively affected by SAA shutting down its route to KwaZulu-Natal. People will take another airline, at a fair price, not the very high rates that SAA charges. Have you ever heard of an ordinary worker taking SAA to Cape Town or Port Elizabeth or eThekwini? No! They take kulula.com or FlySafair or one of the other low-cost airlines. SAA is a thief of ordinary people’s money and Ramaphosa and Gordhan want us to subsidise them.
Save us from these political capitalists.
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