It was the intervention by Deputy Public Enterprises Minister Phumulo Masualle that brokered a terse truce in an often heated meeting when SAA appeared before the Parliament’s public spending watchdog, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts on Wednesday 13 November.
That notice came in the wake of SAA saying it wanted to save R700-million by shedding 994 jobs, apparently after deadlocked wage negotiations. The opposition party has long called for the privatisation of the national airline, which since June 2017 received around R15.7-billion in government bailouts. This includes the R5.5-billion allocated as recently as September 2019, but excludes the undertaking by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni in the medium-term budget policy statement to make R9.2-billion available to meet maturing debt repayments.
He did not actually say whether the government had agreed to the business rescue in response to a question by DA MP Alf Lees. So, while it emerged SAA had “put all options on the table”, the official response from the shareholder – that’s government, and specifically Public Enterprises – remained unclear.