SAA CEO Vuyani Jarana’s week started with a grilling over the beleaguered airline and recent calls from on high to have it closed down.
Reacting to weekend comments by finance minister Tito Mboweni calling for the shutting of SAA, and supportive statements by Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, Jarana said there “is no easy way” to reverse the rot that had taken root over the last decade.
“It will take three years to break even and that’s what it’s going to take. There is no silver bullet.”
Commenting on Gordhan’s comments that the airline’s turnaround strategy should be urgently implemented, Jarana said “we’re ahead of the plan”.
He mentioned that the inventorising of assets had been prioritised and that the bleeding from loss-making routes such as the London-line, “which was a sinkhole for us”, had been stemmed.
He also said that gross domestic profit on local and regional routes was also much better than it used to be, with the only continental route lagging behind being the one to Entebbe, Uganda.
Asked whether it wasn’t perhaps time to prioritise the privatisation of SAA seeing as it was “a vanity project”, Jarana said it would be up to the airline’s shareholders to make such a decision.
Effectively it means that, because the airline is government owned, the issue over whether SAA should be sustained or shuttered should be put to a referendum.
But Jarana called for public faith in what was happening at the airline.
“The SAA is fixable”, he said.
