PARLIAMENT - Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan on Thursday cast the ongoing furore over funding for South African Airways as an ideological battle and said those opposing it were in denial about the damage state capture wrought on parastatals.
Gordhan, replying to a motion brought by DA MP Geordin Hill-Lewis on "the burden of sustaining non-profitable state-owned entities", accused the official opposition of confusing the public.
"Because it is misleading to tell the public that the DA is actually acting in the interest of South Africans when it critiques SOEs when it actually provides no insight to the South African public on the kind of damage that state capture has done to the state entities."
Gordhan said the rent-seeking state capture scandal had robbed the country of potentially hundreds of billions of rand and those failing to see how profoundly it compromised entities like Eskom, Transnet and SAA had no willingness to confront the facts.
He was speaking in the National Assembly as former SAA chairperson Dudu Myeni was grilled before the Zondo commission on complaints from board members that she had behaved recklessly while at the helm of the airline.
Myeni, who was declared a delinquent director for life in May by the North Gauteng High Court, refused to answer questions on the grounds that she may incriminate herself.
Gordhan has been adamant that SAA must be saved and restructured, despite losing almost R11 billion in the past two years.
An in-term allocation of R10.5bn to fund the business rescue plan for the airline adopted in July, was made last week in the medium-term budget policy statement by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, with patent reluctance.
Mboweni has termed the decision “difficult” from both a financial and political point of view, and has listed the departments from which he took money to shift to SAA.
He has, without further explanation, gone as far as accusing Gordhan of misleading the public on the subject.
Gordhan reserved his ideological scorn for the DA and tried to rubbish their insistence that the allocated amounted to yet another “bailout” for a sinking parastatal.
He said it was a normal recapitalisation that would pay, among other things, for retrenchment packages for staff and refunds for customers who paid for flight tickets they were unable to use.
The DA, he said, cared not for the working class who would have lost their jobs with no payouts if SAA had been liquidated, as DA MP Alf Lees insisted on Thursday it should have been, and was effectively telling customers in need of a refund to “go to hell”.
“Let’s 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 not mask it with all sorts of metaphors,” he said.
He accused Hill-Lewis of dumbing down a potentially interesting debate about the role of SOEs in the economy with nothing but bluster, motivated by the desire to see the privatisation of all state-owned enterprises.
"The DA is no more than an old-style neo-liberal organisation with a majority of market fundamentalists," he added, saying the party even purged members who strayed from this thinking from its ranks.
Gordhan reiterated that SAA would be restructured with the help of private investors, stressing for a second day in a row that the department was receiving serious offers in that regard.
“Watch this space over the next few weeks and months as we make announcements in this regard.”