SACP statement on the government’s announcement this week regarding the South African Airways
12 June 2021
The South African Communist Party (SACP) has been the single most consistent and vocal political formation in defending the South African Airways (SAA) and state participation on behalf of the people as a whole in the aviation industry. The SACP did so publicly, as well as in the Alliance, and worked together with the South African Airways (SAA) workers and trade unions that shared the same objective without regard to their trade union federation affiliation.
The battle started with defending SAA against liquidation, against the call that the state no longer had to recapitalise or support SAA financially, and against the call that SAA was not a strategic public entity. After winning the battle against liquidation, our fight shifted to defending SAA against wholesale privatisation. Those who wanted SAA to be liquidated formed part of the agenda pushing its wholesale privatisation. The SACP fought against that on all platforms where the battle was taking place. We won the battle against wholesale privatisation of SAA.
But immediately after that victory there was a new attempt to undermine it. This attempt came from the same agenda that failed to achieve liquidation and wholesale privatisation of SAA. This time around that agenda was pushing landslide SAA privatisation with the aim of leaving the state with an insignificant stake which would mean something in sterile theory but nothing effectual in practice. The SACP fought against that as well.
At the end of the day the National Treasury took funds from other baseline programmes and priorities within the framework of the conservative notion of fiscal consolidation involving budget cuts, reducing support for the affected priorities, and refusing to make any provision for the allocation of new money to support SAA rescue, turnaround, and operations. It was the neoliberal austerity stance anchored in an agenda to uproot state participation in key industries such as the network sectors in favour of private sector dominance and profit competition that we were up against.