Gordhan outed

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan’s unethical attempts to privatise SAA through the back door were eventually outed (“The sad assassination of an iconic airline”, March 15).

Gordhan was hell-bent on selling SAA to cronies, thereby undermining a norm relating to the sale of equity in state-owned companies. The cabinet may have sanctioned the termination of the Takatso Consortium deal, but the murmurs over its secrecy will follow Gordhan into retirement.

The deal exposed Gordhan’s duplicity and disregard for transparency and accountability obligations. It is hard to disagree with pundits who have thrown cold water on the partnership as amateurish, ambitious and controversial. That’s because political manoeuvrings were put before commercial interests.

An obvious red flag was the fact that SAA went into a business rescue process as it was unable to pay back the money borrowed on state guarantees. The other is that Gordhan has been cagey over apprising public representatives about how the partnership was concluded.

Clearly, President Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t shocked that there has not been a substantial deal in the past three years, just like his glaring omission of anything to do with SAA’s strategic deal in the recent state of the nation address.

It clearly dawned on Ramaphosa that Gordhan overlooked the unsound balance sheet of the preferred entity to deliver on the terms of the acquisition. The partial due diligence and risk assessment in an already precarious situation is prima facie proof of skulduggery.

All this happens while the blame-shifting and meddling episodes within Eskom point to Gordhan as wrongfully exercising public power with impunity. That’s in many ways an indicator of our beloved country being leaderless. South Africans must rise on May 29 to save their country.

Morgan Phaahla

Ekurhuleni