The ANC must accept that SAA’s days are over

In buckling to pressure from its leftist allies and announcing it will try to revive the dead duck which is South African Airways, the ANC is ignoring reality, both local and global.

SAA’s debts are enormous, although nowhere near the scale of the other bottomless pit state-owned enterprise, Eskom.

The only sensible way to pay off some of that debt would be to liquidate the airline and sell its assets. That is precisely what the business rescue practitioners, appointed earlier this year to turn around SAA, have tried to do.

The bitter national reality is that there simply is not the money in the state system to bail out SAA yet again.

However, the broader global reality has to be faced, too. And that is that airlines are collapsing around the world because of the coronavirus pandemic. Many of them will never fly again.

The golden age of air travel will become just a memory as airlines are forced to hike fares to survive and consumers globally will take years to get over their fear of flying which is, clearly and correctly, seen as the prime vector for the virus.

Yet, even if there were no global air travel meltdown, SAA would have been difficult to sustain as a business operation.

That is because it is what is known as an “end of hemisphere” carrier, which is a long distance from prime foreign markets. Those sort of airlines need strong global partners to survive.

In Africa, South Africa has been left way behind in the airline business by Ethiopia and Kenya – and now even Rwanda – which have established viable hubs for routes into Europe, Asia and even North America.

At home, air travel has been done better and cheaper by SAA’s competitors.

Its days are over. It’s time the ANC accepted that.

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