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Our national airline is a national embarrassment, plain and simple.

Many state-owned enterprises fail to deliver the goods – a sideways glance in the direction of the SABC – but in terms of abject failure SAA might just come out trumps.

They’ve finally booted the woefully incompetent Dudu Myeni, after years of bungling bureaucracy, although the body blows will continue for some time to come.

This Zapiro effort from back in 2015 just about sums it up:

Those angry expats over in Australia love to stick their noses in and say shite like ‘this is Africa’, but they would be forgetting about the success of Ethiopian Airlines.

Huff Post SA did a piece on the airline’s booming business two weeks ago, so let’s get some of those details:

Ethiopian Airlines’ latest annual report for 2015/6 revealed it reached record profitability despite deflation of African currencies putting a slight damper on its margins. In the year leading to June 2016, it raked in a staggering 6.12 billion Birr (approximately R4.08 billion*), almost doubling its profits from the year before.

Meanwhile, over at South African Airways, commercial viability had by then already become somewhat of an urban legend. In its 2015/6 year, by comparison, it posted a loss of R1.5 billion which its then-acting chief executive called “pleasing” given the R5.6 billion loss the year before. By 2016/7, any illusion of recovery had fully dissipated, and the tragicomedy reached even greater heights, bailout by bailout and scandal by scandal.

Any time a R1,5 billion loss is called ‘pleasing’ you know you’re in kak.

So how have our Ethiopian counterparts managed to rake in the cash, whilst here at home the state coffers are plundered time and time again in the name of bailouts?

Back in 2016 the airline’s group CEO Tewolde Gebremariam laid out a number of pillars for success:

A clear long-term vision for the airline which must come from government and policymakers: “The government has to answer the question about whether it sees the airline as a strategic asset or simply business”…

Frugality and adjusting the airline’s operating model in accordance with its available funds: Unlike SAA, for example, Ethiopian has not adopted a huge ‘discount’ model for government departments or corporate clients…

Strict principles of non-interference from politicians: the first time a top army official attempted to interfere in the airline, he was “publicly executed as a deterrence to others who might dream of eroding the independence of the airline” (an otherwise unconfirmed claim reported by This Day). According to Gebremariam in an interview with Skift, “Ethiopian Airlines is a 100 percent government-owned organization [sic], but ownership and management of the airline are completely separate”.

OK, that execution is unacceptable, but imagine a politics-free state enterprise?

Aggressive investment in infrastructure, skills development, backward-and-forward industry linkages: The airline trains 4,000 students at a time, possess the largest cargo terminal in Africa…

Hiring professional management staff based on merit rather than motivated by patronage and cronyism: Ethiopian Airlines’ management team had over 421 years of airline industry experience between them…

So it turns out that the airline runs like a successful business should – who would have thought it was that simple?

There’s no doubting that Ethiopia Airlines benefits from its location, where it can operate as a “multi-hub” network, but it helps when you act as an actual business rather than a “politically distorted, bloated and endlessly controversial entity”.

Huff Post SA can deliver the final body blows:

While Ethiopian has engendered a commitment to “national duty”…SAA evokes only national shame given the scarcity of resources spent propping up a shoddy operation that could be better spent on functional developmental expenditure.

Where Ethiopian has developed considerably strict and reliable internal controls, SAA’s inner machinations are hard to discern and raise red flags. The 2015 Ernst & Young forensic investigation into 48 tenders at SAA, for example, reported severe problems or irregularities with more than half these deals…

If there is a crucial lesson (among the many, many lessons) for SAA in Ethiopian’s long-term success story, it is surely this: when the piggy bank is empty, it’s empty, and there’s no way around it other than to change your strategy.

Or, you know, we could just keep on bailing them out whilst other areas drastically in need of funding remain unaddressed.

Via PoliticsWeb, here’s Mmusi Maimane’s answer:

Fellow South Africans,

We don’t need to carry on propping up a national carrier for the sake of a corrupt elite, at the cost of millions of desperately poor South Africans. We must let it go.

SAA must be placed into business rescue until it has stabilised, and then it must be dismantled and sold. The vast sums of money we will save can be ploughed straight back into any number of programmes that directly benefit the poor.

We won’t be the first country to give up its national airline, and we certainly won’t be the last either. In a globally competitive world, the most efficient, cost effective players will quickly step in and fill the gaps.

Life will carry on after SAA, but only with more money for the poor and less for the corrupt. Which is the way it should be.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

[sources:huffpostsa&politicsweb]