Care must be taken in SAA turnaround plan

YESTERDAY , the Federation of Unions of South Africa (Fedusa) general secretary, Dennis George, participated in a high-level meeting in Johannesburg, led by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, on the future of SAA, the troubled national carrier.

The Airline Pilots Association of South Africa, one the biggest trade unions at SAA, is affiliated to Fedusa.

Uasa, another affiliate of Fedusa, also has members at the national airline. Gordhan wants the SAA board of directors and management to implement the airline’s turnaround strategy that has already gone through at least three different iterations in recent years, without being able to pull it out of total dependency on state bail-outs and government guarantees. It is estimated that National Treasury has already sunk close to R19 billion over the past 15 years into the national carrier. Last month, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni injected a further R5-billion bail-out into SAA in the hope of restoring it to viability.

We welcome the Department of Public Enterprises saying that its priority is to “stabilise SAA financially and through a rigorous process of cost reduction”.

However, SAA should not resort to retrenchments as an easy way out of a mess created by governance failure and corruption.

FRANK NXUMALO | Fedusa media and

research officer