SAA bailout will continue the rot

So, the president has approved a commission of inquiry into the goings-on at the SABC. How noble. This comes after years and years of accusations levelled at government that they’ve turned a blind eye to the mess Hlaudi Motsoeneng and company created at the national broadcaster.

It is no understatement that lives have been destroyed during the deliberate havoc that was created at the SABC because the people tasked with running a national asset decided to turn that asset into one that only served the interests of a greedy few.

But that’s not all. The fact the president has now seen fit to approve a judicial commission of inquiry into all that went on there serves to confirm a very deliberate strategy that’s being used to loot state resources through state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

One can pick any SOE and the strategy will reveal itself. Take the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa and the embarrassing tales of locomotives that were procured from Spain and then found to be “too tall” for local infrastructure. This only emerged after a payment of more than R500 million had been made.

Then CEO Lucky Montana and engineer Daniel Mthimkhulu were the sacrificial lambs to assure the public that action was being taken over what was clearly gross mismanagement of public funds.

Eskom, another SOE that has been embroiled in a series of scandals that again point to a strategy of mismanagement, also confirms these state-owned companies have been deliberately chosen as vehicles to siphon off public funds with the full knowledge that it is very easy to kick for touch where SOEs are concerned because all of them come with their own boards which can easily stand in the way of any state institution that wants to hold management to account.

Cases of mismanagement at Eskom are too numerous to mention but, as in the case of the national broadcaster, a captured board played gatekeeper and frustrated all efforts to rein in Brian Molefe and company over questionable deals.

At the height of the battle between former finance minister Pravin Gordhan and the board chairperson at SAA, Dudu Myeni, rumours were rife that if Gordhan was to ever lose his job it would be because of his insistence that the board of SAA release financials for the two years that it had failed to do so before any bailout could be considered.

Although Gordhan ended up approving guarantees to the tune of R5 billion to keep SAA afloat, he resisted all efforts to simply pump money into the black hole that is SAA without asking for guarantees. And because of that he paid with his job.

Fast-forward exactly a year and his successor as finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, is exhorting us to avoid “hysteria” when discussing options that must be considered to rescue SAA. One of the options is to sell government’s stake in Telkom to raise R10 billion to rescue the national carrier.

Telkom happens to be one SOE that was privatised and is now a company. Gigaba should be the last person to ask anyone to not be hysterical over this proposed bailout. SAA appears to be the last bastion of the looting strategy.

Sydney Majoko.