Busi Mavuso, CEO of Business Leadership South Africa, has criticised the emerging plan to retain South African Airways (SAA) in an undefined ‘new’ form – as pledged in a statement from the Department of Public Enterprises last week.
Writing in the Business Day, Mavuso argued that the Covid-19 pandemic would reshape the world’s economies. Economies that would emerge strongest would be those that used the crisis to reorient themselves to new realities.
The approach to SAA showed that ‘almost immediately, our government goes back to the old playbook in dealing with the airline.’
The government had no precise plan, but it was apparent that SAA would continue to be a cost to the fiscus – when a better choice would be to devote South Africa’s limited resources to supporting industries that would have robust post-Covid opportunities.
‘I can’t help but feel we’ll be one of the laggards in this global economy and will remain stuck in dealing with problems of yesteryear,’ wrote Mavuso.
She added that ‘the fancy footwork around SAA amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road once again. The economic reform agenda is the central characteristic of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration, which shouldn’t in practice mean taking the same old ideas and dressing them up differently. We have to fundamentally break with the past if we’re serious about changing things around, reimagining what the SA economy should be like after Covid-19. Promises of “overhauling” state-owned enterprises should not prove hollow.’
[Picture: Bob Adams, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67874278]