Like the old ABC ad we are told SAA is new but nothing changed except the accounting and taxpayer risk.
SAA planes. Picture: Gallo Images/Jacques Stander
There used to be an ad for a washing detergent called ABC. You saw two guys on screen, in collared shirts saying that neither could see the difference between the two tops.
One was new, the other had just been washed using ABC. It was not exactly the most creative moment in advertising, but it became an accidental metaphor for SAA.
The national airline has been cleaned up by business rescue but now, it seems, it’s all rinse and repeat with the same old cycle.
This time, the money’s just been obfuscated differently. First as a share capital issue to its own and sole shareholder for R1 billion in 2024-25.
Now, it looks as if it is back to the banks, who stand to lose nothing if SAA defaults.
Because either government will pay the bill (read here, you and I, again) or they’ll just annex the assets that you and I have paid for with the R133 billion that the airline has already bled from the fiscus.
Wayne Duvenage of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse is right when he questions the purpose of the funding.
But SAA leases its aircraft, it already owns the buildings it occupies and unless it plans to purchase a giant pie in the sky, it can only be working capital that’s required.
That was, if memory serves, the purpose of the Takatso investment that never happened. And, alas, as taxpayers have seen over the years, giving SAA money is tantamount to a bottomless pit.
Can anyone honestly see the difference between SAA and SAA 2.0?
The balance sheet changed. The accounting changed. Yet taxpayers are assumed to believe that the next time will somehow be different.
Like that old ABC advert, we’re told the shirt is as good as new. Except everyone knows it’s still the same old shirt.
Rinse. Repeat.
