THE STORY OF HOW SAA WAS HIJACKED
CYNTHIA Stimpel, born 64 years ago in Bosmont, Johannesburg, had a warm family of eight siblings and a pair of caring and hard-working parents. She describes how her mother sewed everything, from clothing to curtains and everything in-between.
Ethical, moral and hard work were the accepted values. Stimpel had an aptitude for figures and an astute grasp of the financial industry, which translated into a successful banking career.
Even though Stimpel was born during the apartheid era and was from a previously disadvantaged background, she was not the kind of person who bore a grudge. She worked around the silly rules of not sharing toilets and sitting at opposite ends of a hall, and got on with life and business.
Her partner died in a car crash, leaving her to raise her daughters. She did not give in to sadness or let her daughters see her grief. She worked her way through that. Years later, she met her husband, Michael Stimpel, a German, with whom she carried on a long-distance relationship.
When SAA head-hunted her, not once, but three times, she heeded the call and went to work in Kempton Park. SAA was a very different world to private business. She started in 2006 as head financial risk manager.
SAA was already in trouble, hit by resignations, “struggling financially and in dire need of cash flow”. The “unabridged birth certificate and written permission” requirement from Malusi Gigaba’s Home Affairs struck at the heart of SAA’s financial needs, especially as his department was woefully unprepared in implementing the new law.
Next to enter, flamboyantly, was Dudu Myeni, whose comment, “I don’t have enough outfits to wear”, to halt the frequent number of board meetings, was astounding.
In the government, Barbara Hogan replaced Gigaba. Myeni got rid of four chief executives. Hogan wanted an equitable balance sheet for SAA for a loan. Stimpel asks: “How do you get out of debt when you are constantly borrowing, you no longer have assets to sell.” She concludes: “I didn’t understand what had happened. Many years later (at the Zondo enquiry) I finally understood.”
Money flowed through SAA like a raging torrent. “Like a parent unable to say no to a spoilt child, the government kept on dishing out the dough. The bailouts were getting bigger and bigger.” Dudu Myeni said it like it was: “It is our time to eat” – and eat they did. Copiously and grossly.
Stimpel “asked too many questions” which were not treated with concern but with hostility. “Increasingly I felt I could not stay silent … I could not live with myself … ”
Her family supported her decision to become a whistle-blower and persuaded her later to “let it go”.
The situation Stimpel found herself in has no easy bounce back. You can’t brush it off, or go to bed and wake up the following morning and hope that you feel better and that the situation has improved. It takes time to work though.
Stimpel found comfort in doing the Camino in Spain, and returned re-energised, more able to cope with the legal aftermath and accept that her core values, ethics and morality had been thoroughly undermined and abused.
Part of her recovery has been to write it all down in Hijackers on Board.
It is now up to us, the readers, to join her in standing up for an ethical society.