Bitter harvest of SAA and Eskom

SOUTH Africans came face-to-face this week with the harsh reality of business rescue: the national flag carrier SAA slashing its local routes to one, eviscerating its regional schedule and brutally resizing its international aspirations.

In the same breath, local carrier and SAA affiliate, SA Express, was placed under business rescue too. Jobs will be lost; assets will be shed and consumer confidence will be shaken – or will it?

The country has been crying for action to redress the cashburning vanity project that SAA had become, the calls all the more strident in the wake of court room testimonies of how previous opportunities to save it and the taxpayer came to nought because of the alleged rent-seeking tendencies of its previous board chair.

This week we saw that action and it was harsh.

The greater lesson for us all though is what lies ahead for Eskom. Here the ramifications are going to be slightly different – for a start, everyone will have to start paying for the power they consume. Secondly, if the government goes ahead to free up the utility’s monopoly on the grid, consumers will have more options, with less of a demand for Eskom in its current guise.

Whatever option is followed, Eskom will never be the same again – it cannot be as big, as unwieldy, as inefficient or its staff as overpaid as it currently is because we can no longer afford to sustain something that can’t meet its basic mandate because of kleptocratic mismanagement.

There will be pain, but when we weep for the jobs that will be lost and the anguish to be inflicted, we should be careful who we blame – and indeed who we are prepared to go to jail to protect. Because this is their bitter harvest which we have now been forced to reap on our own.