More than R20.6bn has been lost recently by just five of South Africa’s biggest state-owned enterprises, with PetroSA the latest to make headlines when it reported the biggest loss on record by a parastatal.
The state-owned oil company managed to blow more than R12bn on a fruitless exploration mission off the coast of Mossel Bay in the past financial year, bringing its total loss to R14.5bn for the 2015 financial year. (It reported a loss of more than R1.6bn in 2014.) The parastatal’s 2015 financial loss is 35% more than the allocation the Northern Cape received from National Treasury this year.
Other bleeding parastatals include South African Airways (SAA), the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the South African Post Office and the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral). Their combined losses top R20.6bn, without much hope of their prospects improving drastically in the near future.
SAA, for example, which has received over R30bn in government bailouts, loan guarantees and grants since 2007, is yet to turn a profit. Its latest publicly available results for the 2013/14 financial year show a loss of R2.59bn. The SABC’s 2015 loss of R394.7m, meanwhile, dwarfs the budget of the Public Protector, who needs to make do with a mere R246.1m this year.
