Our beloved country is leaderless

PUBLIC Enterprise Minister Pravin Gordhan’s unethical attempts to privatise the SA Airways (SAA) through the back door were eventually outed. Gordhan was hellbent on selling SAA to cronies, thereby undermining a norm relating to the sale of equity in state-owned companies.

The Cabinet may have sanctioned the termination of the Takatso Consortium deal, but the murmurs over its secrecy will follow Gordhan in retirement.

The whole deal exposed Gordhan’s duplicity and disregard for transparency and accountability.

It’s hard to disagree with pundits who have thrown cold water on the partnership as amateurish, ambitious and controversial. That’s because political manoeuvrings were put before commercial interests to cast down the shift towards renewal.

An obvious red flag was the fact that SAA went into a business rescue process as it was unable to pay back the money borrowed on state guarantees. The other is that Gordhan has been cagey to appraise public representatives about how the partnership was concluded.

Clearly, President Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t shocked like all of us that there has never been a substantial deal in the past 3 years. Just like Ramaphosa’s glaring omission of the SAA’s strategic deal in his recent State of the Nation Address.

It dawned on Ramaphosa that Gordhan overlooked the unsound balance sheet of a preferred equity to deliver on the terms of the acquisition.

The partial due diligence and risk assessment in an already precarious situation is prima facie proof of skullduggery in the realm of cronyism.

All this happens when the blame-shifting and meddling episodes within Eskom point to Gordhan as wrongfully exercising public power with impunity.

That’s in many ways an indicator of our beloved country being leaderless. Rise on May 29 and save South Africa.

MORGAN PHAAHLA | Ekurhuleni