Corruption red lights flash in sale of SAA

Ninety years and a month ago, on February 1 1934, the first SAA flight went into operation.

It belonged to the South African people following the government of the day acquiring Union Airways.

The last I checked, SAA still belonged to the good people of SA.

If it must be chopped up and sold off, the people of SA must know and understand why their property, their asset, their children’s wealth, is being sold off.

If SAA is a loss-maker, or no longer of any strategic value to the country, it should be sold off.

We would not be the first country in the world to sell off a national airline.

Countless others have done it before us, and many others will do it after us.

Key to the disposal, however, is that the ordinary South African man and woman, the person who pays value-added tax and other taxes, must know why their property is being sold off and just how the price was calculated.

No-one should tell them they do not deserve to know why their property should be sold off.

No-one should tell them they are simpletons, and that the detail of the sale of their property, which they have bailed out and supported for decades, is too complex for them or their parliamentary representatives to understand.

It is worth noting here that the SA taxpayer has sunk an astonishing R38.1bn into the open maw of SAA in just the five years between April 2018 and April 2023.

Yet, this past week, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan brazenly told the SA public that they have no right to hear about corruption allegations (made by a senior civil servant) concerning SAA.

He demanded that journalists be barred from parliamentary proceedings looking into this.

Further, members of parliament — the representatives of the people — were told that they had to sign non-disclosure agreements before perusing SAA sale documents that may shed light on the alleged corruption.

Gordhan seems to think this is Russia or some such woebegone country where members of the executive say “jump” and the public asks how high.

Either that, or he thinks we are back in the days when he served in a Jacob Zuma cabinet

— a time when citizens were seen as something to be sucked dry while their concerns and cries counted for nothing.

In those Zuma days, executives such as Gordhan just had to utter the words “national security” and the curtains would come down.

It is a dangerous place, this. What is utterly disappointing is that Gordhan, a man who many of us have admired for his stance against Zuma (only after six years of serving in his cabinet), should know what constitutes a corruption red light.

When a minister wants to sell off a state asset in secrecy, when the same minister demands journalists leave the room when he discusses the disposal of said asset, then those red lights flash very brightly and very rapidly.

The stench of corruption permeates the air.

What is Gordhan hiding? If the deal he has made to sell off SA is a good one, why does it need a veil of secrecy?

From news reports of his extraordinary behaviour in parliament last week, the dealmaking involved respected banks, above board valuations, and all kinds of approvals that Gordhan had to secure.

If all these are available and are legitimate, what is there to hide?

Many of us would hug him for getting rid of a state-owned enterprise that is sucking SA dry!

From Gordhan’s contortions (not just last week but for the past three years of the life of this deal) the main conclusion one can make is that there may be merit in allegations of corruption in the conceptualisation and execution of this deal.

The alternative is that Gordhan has gone completely power-mad and believes that he is the be-all and end-all of SA. But which is it?

The SAA sale was apparently undertaken via a tender process.

A tender process cannot be as opaque as the past few years of SAA’s life have been.

By its very nature, a tender process has an outcome which is then available to members of the public to scrutinise and query if need be.

If the current winners of the tender process are happy with their win, and if Gordhan values transparency and accountability, he should just publish the entire bid documentation from the RFP (request for proposals) stage to the conclusion.

If it’s all above board, he must sell the thing.

But he hasn’t released these documents and has blocked attempts at any kind of transparency on this transaction.

That is not just unacceptable. It is unforgivable in any political culture which values accountability.

If Gordhan cannot accept that we live in an open society where the citizen reigns supreme, he should simply resign. Or his boss should fire him.