‘We hear you,’ says SAA to AKA after he complains about being forced to listen to Michael Bublé

Rapper AKA took to Twitter on Thursday evening to complain about having to listen to Michael Bublé following a flight as opposed to South African music.

“Dear @flysaa why do you play ANYTHING that is NOT SOUTH AFRICAN in our planes. You are the FLAG carrier airline of our country, furthermore, you are a STATE-OWNED entity. Please explain to us why I am listening to Michael Bublé as I disembark? Disgraceful,” he tweeted.

The airline responded on Friday morning, agreeing with the rapper that this was not ideal.

“We hear you. We know that this – amongst many other things, is something we need to fix,” said its official account.

“We are working on making flying SAA truly flying RSA and by making one little change at a time, we want to make you proud to #flysaa. Izandla ziyagezana, your criticism is our motivation.”

When SAA said it had “many other things” to fix, it was not exaggerating.

Moneyweb has reported that the airline has been in decline since 2012, suffering total losses of nearly R18 billion between then and 2017. By the end of the 2017 financial year, the airline reported that its liabilities exceeded its assets and equity by R17.8 billion.

June saw the dramatic departure of CEO Vuyani Jarana. His resignation letter, which was leaked to the media, painted a picture of a sorry state of affairs at the airline.

He bemoaned the lack of support from government in tackling mounting debt levels, bureaucratic hurdles getting in the way of key decisions and a lack of trust between the state and the executive as some of the chief reasons responsible for government “systematically undermining” the successful implementation of the strategy.

The airline was in talks at the time with international and domestic lenders to obtain R4 billion in funding to run its operations for the current financial year.

(Compiled by Daniel Friedman.)

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