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By African News Agency 
13h ago
PARLIAMENT – Public Business Minister Pravin Gordhan on Thursday called the ongoing furor over South African Airways funding an ideological battle and said opponents of it deny the damage the state capture has done to parastatals.
Gordhan, responding to a motion filed by DA Rep. Geordin Hill-Lewis on “the burden of supporting state nonprofit entities,” accused the official opposition of misleading the public.
“Because it is misleading to tell the public that the Prosecutor’s Office is actually acting in the interest of South Africans when it criticizes state-owned companies when in fact it does not provide information to the South African public about the kind of harm that state capture has caused to state entities. “
Gordhan said the state rent-seeking scandal had robbed the country of potentially hundreds of billions of rand and those who failed to see how deeply it compromised entities like Eskom, Transnet and SAA were unwilling to confront the facts.
He was speaking in the National Assembly when former SAA chairman Dudu Myeni was questioned before the Zondo commission over complaints from board members that he had behaved recklessly while in command of the airline.
Myeni, who was declared a principal delinquent for life in May by the North Gauteng Superior Court, declined to answer questions, claiming she could incriminate herself.
Gordhan has insisted that SAA must be salvaged and restructured, despite losing nearly R11 billion in the past two years.
Last week, in Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s medium-term budget policy statement, a forward allocation of R10.5 billion was made to finance the airline’s business rescue plan adopted in July, with obvious reluctance.
Mboweni has called the decision “difficult” from both a financial and political point of view, and has listed the departments from which he took money to move to SAA.
Without further explanation, he went on to accuse Gordhan of misleading the public on the matter.
Gordhan reserved his ideological contempt for the district attorney and tried to squander his insistence that the assignment amounted to another “bailout” for a sinking parastatal.
He said it was a normal recapitalization that would pay for, among other things, downsizing packages and refunds for customers who paid for airline tickets they couldn’t use.
The district attorney, he said, did not care about the working class who would have lost their jobs without pay if the SAA had been liquidated, as Deputy District Attorney Alf Lees insisted Thursday it should have been, and was effectively telling them. to customers who needed a refund. go to hell.
“We are going to unmask ourselves … let’s tell South Africans very frankly that we come from very different backgrounds in terms of our world views and philosophies, and we will not mask with all kinds of metaphors,” he said.
He accused Hill-Lewis of simplifying a potentially interesting debate on the role of state-owned companies in the economy with nothing but bravado, motivated by the desire to see the privatization of all state-owned companies.
“The DA is nothing more than an old-style neoliberal organization with a majority of market fundamentalists,” he added, saying that the party even purged members who deviated from this thinking from its ranks.
Gordhan reiterated that SAA will restructure with the help of private investors, highlighting for the second day in a row that the department is receiving serious offers in that regard.
“Please watch this space for the next few weeks and months as we make announcements about it.”
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