Lame duck leadership keeps SAA flying low

THE government refuses to sell off South African Airways even though it continues to bleed money — because, it says, it considers the entity to be of strategic national interest.

Yet those appointed to run the state-owned airline do not treat it as such.

With its current challenges, some of which are not of its own making but are the result of a tough global aviation environment, you would think that the SAA board would be permanently preoccupied with saving the airline.

But judging by the latest round of infighting — this time involving chairwoman Dudu Myeni, who is President Jacob Zuma’s close friend, and chief executive Nico Bezuidenhout — the airline, its customers and taxpayers in general are the last things on the board members’ minds.

Paranoia at the parastatal has reached such heights that board members are searched for spying devices before meetings and one was caught smuggling a recording device into one of the gatherings.

That is certainly not the right way to run a business, especially one that is responsible for transporting thousands of people around the country and abroad on a daily basis.

The spy drama emerges amid revelations that SAA lost a whopping R100-million in just three months as a result of its new route-sharing deal with the United Arab Emirates-based Etihad airline. This deal was supposed to help SAA save money, following years of the company being forced to fly to loss-making destinations.

What this highlights is that SAA’s current turnaround strategy, the latest in a series over the past few years, is not working as planned.

This raises the question of whether SAA will ever be able to stand on its own and operate without constantly having to ask taxpayers to bail it out.

While the solution might indeed be to privatise the airline, the reality is that such a measure is not likely to enjoy support in the government — especially not in this period, when the governing party is concerned about keeping labour unions on its side ahead of potentially bruising local government elections.

What should, therefore, be the interim solution is the appointment of suitable and permanent people to run SAA both at board and executive management levels. Currently in charge of the utility is an acting CEO who has a permanent job elsewhere and a chairman whose only reason for holding the post is that she is friends with the president.