INSIGHT: ANC stealing money to throw at SAA

The fake “business rescue” of SAA is a pantomime that continues to surprise, amuse and confound. This week it was announced that the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) would lend the struggling airline R3.5bn. This was because when it went into voluntary business rescue in December a lie was created that now cannot be undone.

The voluntary bit is a misnomer — the lie.

The government put SAA into rescue only because trade union Solidarity was going to court to apply to liquidate it.

Having escaped certain annihilation for the airline had the Solidarity approach succeeded, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan scampered around trying to raise the money SAA needed to see it through three months of business rescue.

He got the private sector to reluctantly stump up R2bn, and finance minister Tito Mboweni, probably delighted at some movement at his least favourite state-owned enterprise, promised another R2bn.

It never happened, and the R2bn the banks paid up has already been eaten.

You can see why. Cost-cutting has been superficial, and a friend who flew SAA to Johannesburg from London on Tuesday night reports that business class was half full and there were no more than 20 people in economy. Still, the treasury has exhausted all its emergency funds and couldn’t supply the R2bn it promised.

So the DBSA, which has already had to come to Eskom’s rescue on occasions when the state itself couldn’t, was tapped on the shoulder — not for the missing R2bn but for R3.5bn. The price of survival had increased by R1.5bn in just a few weeks. And of course it didn’t happen without some strong political backing. Just days earlier, the national executive committee of the ANC had pronounced itself “determined” that SAA should survive, whatever this business rescue stuff is about.

It all enables the joint business rescue “practitioners”, Les Matuson and Siviwe Dongwana, to tell Business Day’s Carol Paton, presumably with straight faces, that “stakeholders should now have comfort that the rescue process is on a significantly sounder footing and that passengers and travel agencies and airline partners may continue to book air travel on SAA with confidence”.

Seriously? These two have two to three weeks to come up with a plan for SAA’s survival and the only way to do that is for the state to pump more money into it after the DBSA’s contribution has been spent. That won’t take long.

There’s something sickening about it all. The CEO of the DBSA is Patrick Dlamini, ex-SAA; the chair of the DBSA is Enoch Godongwana, ally of the president and chief of economic policy in the ANC.

The new deputy chair, appointed along with Godongwana in 2019, is respected Stellenbosch University development economist Mark Swilling. Now that the DBSA is being looted of R3.5bn in broad daylight by the ANC, I wonder how he feels. I’d resign.

In no way can SAA be considered anything other than a glamour project. It makes no money and provides no unique service

The whole point of a development bank such as the DBSA is to finance projects that promote development. In no way can SAA be considered anything other than a glamour project. It makes no money and provides no unique service. Oh, wait, it does. It provides ANC ministers, their staff, MPs and their families with free flights. That is many thousands of flights. SAA isn’t an airline so much as a perk for the privileged.

Matuson and Dongwana border on the ridiculous when they insist that “SAA is a key strategic asset which needs to be positioned to provide reliable connectivity to markets within SA, the African continent as well as servicing selected international routes”.

First of all, deciding what is a strategic asset and what isn’t is a political function and not for a business rescue practitioner to put his name to. Second, it is utter rubbish. SAA has no strategic value whatsoever. British Airways brings more tourists to this country than SAA. Better-run African airlines than SAA can more than easily service travel into the rest of the continent from here.

And, obviously, there’d be a stack of domestic money around to buy up SAA or start new airlines. Typically for a state-owned entity, SAA crowds out other airlines when what we need is for them to be crowded in.

Look at the good job Safair is doing after its modest beginning. You can make a case for the state to be involved in services in the economy where they are to the advantage of the poor — Eskom is one; a state bank would even be plausible.

But an airline is an insult to us all. I wonder, if you asked them, how many members of the ANC national executive committee who decided that SAA “must” continue would have any idea where money comes from, what the difference between money and wealth is, and how — if they do — wealth is created?

The fact is that the money now to be used to prop up SAA is being stolen from the public purse, just like it was being stolen in Jacob Zuma’s time. SAA will fail, and fail, and fail again under the ANC.

And, again, the big banks are there, greasing the wheels. They should be ashamed of themselves. A patriotic bank would call in its loans and collapse this house of cards once and for all.