An offensive stink and devious web of lies surround SAA sale

National carrier is being sold for a song, but government still liable for its debts

THE withdrawn letter from the National Treasury indicating the 51% stake of SAA sold to the Takatso Consortium is worth a meagre R51 has opened a Pandora’s box of a corrupt and unlawful transaction playing out under our noses.

Fifty one rand! That is what we are expected to accept – hook, line and sinker – to be the value of more than half of a prized asset that has been hitherto our national pride, and a flagship carrier voted as the best African airline, its current financial and other woes notwithstanding. Scandalous!

The infamous letter to the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) indicates that the government will still be saddled with the contingent liabilities of SAA, even though it retains a minority stake.

It is not the intention of this piece to engage in an ideological debate about the correctness and desirability or otherwise of the sale of SAA, as that is a conversation for another time.

Mine is to dig deeper into the transaction itself so as to better understand the glaring misdemeanours around it. There is also a need to properly examine how the disposal of SAA will assist or not assist our cause for genuine economic transformation.

Given the unavoidable stink around the deal, we should also check if this is not another “get-rich-quick” scheme that South Africans are being coerced to get acclimated to in the name of rationalisation, unsaddling the state of debts and other gobbledygook (read privatisation).

Let’s start from the beginning. SAA is in huge debt for myriad reasons, including inefficiencies, bad management, corruption, evergreen contracts, the stripping and selling of assets, including the fleet, and so forth.

What complicates the already dire situation is the lack of accountability and consequence management. This repulsive culture of acting with impunity has taken root, and unfortunately crippled and brought the airline to its knees. Countless bailouts were granted by the government in the hope that they would contribute towards bringing SAA back to profitability. Sadly, it has been billions of rand that went down the drain as we have hitherto been applying a bandage on a festering wound, instead of performing surgery. This approach has not worked. Full stop.

As more of a knee-jerk reaction, the government, through the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE), initiated or rather, announced amid fanfare, a transaction that will see 51% of SAA being acquired by the Takatso Consortium.

This transaction has been mired in secrecy, with its details sketchy. What is more worrisome and alarming is that the National Treasury – a department tasked with managing such transactions – has been deliberately kept in the dark, with the DPE not forthcoming about the finer details of the “deal”.

Is this surprising, and is there no malice intended? Not at all, unless you are unable to connect the dots, if I may borrow the minister of public enterprises’ favourite retort. Cometh the hour, cometh Scopa. A week ago, the DPE and National Treasury were summoned to Parliament to provide an account of the SAA “deal”. It could not have been more explosive as the “letter of account” was hurriedly and inexplicably withdrawn, with Scopa and South Africans left none the wiser. Unfortunately for the DPE, the proverbial horse had already bolted, and the shocking, lopsided details of the transaction are in the public domain, their desperate but futile attempts at concealing them notwithstanding. The rumour mill is in overdrive.

The National Treasury has rightfully pulled a Pontius Pilate on the deal as it is as clueless as you and me about the deal. It has now been reported that the Treasury has withdrawn its support for the transaction – a fatal blow for the deal!

The reason for the Treasury’s apprehension that every South African should share is that “the strategic equity partner may assume very minimal shareholder risk for the acquisition of a majority shareholding at the purchase price of R51”.

The National Treasury is also concerned that government guarantees on SAA’s debt remain in place. It is extremely troubling that the DPE has, without authority and in flagrant violation of the law, committed you and I to continue to pay for SAA’s debts, even though they have shamelessly handed over more than half of our airline to no one knows who, for a meagre R51.

It should, therefore, not be farfetched to surmise that the DPE fraudulently and unlawfully clothed itself with the authority or power to sell a stake in SAA that belongs to the National Treasury.

When the announcement of the much-punted deal was made, I had niggling misgivings as it was simply too good to be true. My extreme discomfort was based not only on the secrecy, but also the many hitherto unanswered questions.

I asked: How was the transaction conceptualised and were the provisions of the law, including those governing procurement, followed?

I was also curious to know how Takatso was identified, by whom, and was a due diligence exercise conducted on both SAA and Takatso? There was obfuscation and deflection, but no satisfactory answers have been forthcoming. Simply put, there are more questions than answers. The more the DPE tries to respond, the less informed South Africans become as officials entangle themselves further in a devious web of lies.

No matter how one looks at the transaction, there is an inescapable, offensive stink about it. The minister and department have flagrantly broken the law in cahoots with the Takatso crowd. South Africans, therefore, have a legitimate expectation of there being serious consequences for those who were fingered.

In any self-respecting country, what has transpired is a dismissible and criminally chargeable offence. Perhaps not in this colony. But time will definitely tell as South Africans cannot afford to be taken for a ride any longer.

Law enforcement agencies and the National Prosecuting Authority must show enthusiasm in expeditiously attending to this intended malfeasance.

This much-needed deterrent should include probing the dubious sale of the SAA fleet, and the ever-green contracts that stripped and continue to strip our national airline to the bone. This would allow us to get to the bottom of the ills that afflict SAA.

The National Treasury must also not be spared our wrath as it has failed to subdue the proverbial horse before it bolted or, at the very least, raise the alarm.

Or should South Africans hold not their collective breath as we seem to have normalised our tolerance of zero consequences for wrongdoers?

Irrespective of the above, this is another corruption-busting litmus test for President Cyril Ramaphosa, and he dare not fail, as it has happened previously.