After giving SA Airways (SAA) more than R24bn in bailouts since 1999, and committing another R21bn in debt guarantees, the government will hand over another R5bn by March.
This time, really, it is the very last cent SAA will ever get from the taxpayer, say the politicians elected to guard the public purse.
Minister of public enterprises Pravin Gordhan, who once more “owns” SAA on behalf of the people, told the airline’s staff on Monday that they must pull up their socks so the airline can keep going.
This is an airline that has notched up a cumulative loss of R18.1bn since 2007. It will add a further R5.7bn for the year ended March 2018. Impressive!
“The SA public is losing patience with SAA and doesn’t think it is viable,” Gordhan said, according to Business Day. “It’s for you, working together, to prove you can make this a good business.”
“The public is losing patience” was not the last falsehood Gordhan told the staff. Since Gordhan is such a man of great integrity, I’m prepared to cut him some slack. He must have been dazed by the candour of our latest finance minister Tito Mboweni. He had been forced into a corner and was trying to do some political damage control at SAA.
It was Mboweni who caused all the trouble. He had the nerve to just tell the truth when asked by investors in New York what the government is going to do with this national embarrassment, SAA.
Mboweni told the investors that if it were up to him, he’d simply close it down.
Mboweni has this tendency to shoot his mouth off. The other day in parliament he said the cabinet should comprise only 20 ministers, 25 at most. That same week he said Eskom had 30,000 too many employees. What is it that this finance minister does not get about job creation?
Mboweni’s loose lips seem to be forcing normally morally upright people like Gordhan to inadvertently tell white lies.
Gordhan has become the minister in charge of SAA again after it was transferred out of the National Treasury a few months ago. It had been parked there since December 2014, when Jacob Zuma placed it under the stewardship of Nhlanhla Nene, a finance minister he trusted would co-operate with SAA chair Dudu Myeni.
“My view is that you can survive well, if you do the right things,” Gordhan said in another fib to the SAA staff on Monday.
There is no doubt in my mind that Gordhan is a man of great integrity. His lifelong, unimpeachable service to the nation is proof of that, together with the persecution he faced from some of his own comrades while, as finance minister, he tried to steer the country away from recession and a junk credit rating.
But even tough people like him have to tell a comforting fib once in a while.
The ANC, through men of such standing as Ace Magashule and Pule Mabe, had already jumped up and shouted that Mboweni’s comments about closing the national carrier were nonsense. Mboweni’s many years outside the formal structures of the movement seem to have interfered with his discipline.
All he has to do when he delivers his budget in February, is hand over the R21bn cheque SAA has demanded. Like Gordhan, expect him to be toeing the party line by then...