Thank you House Chairperson, the industrial action by the workers at the SA Airways is an indictment on the poor management of not only the SAA but the general state of state-owned enterprises.
The poor management is not accidental but it is part of a broader and co- ordinated agenda and machinations by the clique now in power; only in power as extensions of the greed and the desires of the finance years in the private sector. The objective is to deliberately run down the critical and strategic state-owned entities so that in the end they are privatised and handed over on a silver platter to the friends of those in power. This is a
classic state capture by the present regime under President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The workers are made to be casualties of this process. It is the workers who must bear the brunt of the greed of the private sector and woeful incompetence and the brazen corruption of the ANC politicians and their appointees at the state-owned enterprises.
The industrial action by the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, Numsa, and the SA Cabin Crew Association, SACCA, was a response to these evil machinations. It was a rejection of the attempts to make workers casualties of a battle that they are not part of. It was an affirmation of the central role workers play not only at the SAA but in the economy in general.
The failure of the SAA must be put squarely on the shoulders of Cyril Ramaphosa and Gordhan's government, who have failed to stabilise the state- owned entities. They have been presiding over the government for two years now. The SAA, like other state-owned entities such as Eskom, Denel and others are continuing to deteriorate.
There is no comprehensive plan by the Ramaphosa - Gordhan coalition to save state-owned institutions and the broader economic conditions of high unemployment. President Ramaphosa keeps misleading the country with investment conferences that promises billions of rands that no one feels on the ground. If there are billions in investment, why is the SAA planning to retrench workers?
It is therefore correct for workers to unite and fight against retrenchments. The failure of the SAA cannot be blamed on ordinary workers. They cannot be the ones who take responsibility by losing jobs which supports them, their families and their relatives. They are the ones who go to work everyday and relentlessly give up their time, sweat and blood for the SAA that has no regard for workers.
We cannot have an economy that keeps on shedding jobs on the pretext of prudent management of entities. We cannot have state-owned entities that are at the forefront of endangering the livelihoods of thousands of South Africans all because there is a bigger project of handing
over the sovereignty of the country to white monopoly capital.
The workers at the SAA must not lose their jobs. The workers at the SAA must be paid a living and respectable wage. The workers at the SAA must not fall victim to the greed of leeches in big business, which use their appointees in government to destroy state-owned entities. What is needed is a stronger government intervention at the SAA to rescue the airline from collapse.
The SAA should have its capacity developed to such an extent that they can dominate domestic travel routes together with other low-cost airlines. It should not be the case that we have airlines such as British Airways operating domestically in South Africa.
The SAA must own its aircrafts, train its own pilots, develop the capacity of its own engineers and expand its reach into the country and within the continent. The opportunities for growth and sustainability of the airline are massive. We only need to remove the political interference by the demigod of this administration, who
goes around masquerading as the messiah of the state- owned companies but who actually saw the seeds for their destruction while he was the Minister of finance. Pravin must fall. Thank you very much.