Cape Town - Cabinet has retained two members of the SA Airways Board and appointed two new ones, Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown said on Thursday.
Dr John Tambi and Anthony Dixon were appointed, while board chairwoman Duduzile Myeni and Yakhe Kwinana were retained.
Brown said SAA CEO Monwabisi Kalawe and CFO Wolf Meyer would continue serving on the board.
Six board member resignations were adopted at a special general meeting on Thursday.
Brown explained the format of the new board.
"What I wanted was something more agile and mobile with harder skills. Included in that is institutional memory," she told reporters in Cape Town.
"This is the situation of damned if you do and damned if you don't," she said, explaining that Myeni and Kwinana were the longest-serving board members.
Brown admitted the board had been factionalised.
"Actually, individually, they are intellectually astute and incredibly hard-working people, but collectively it just didn't work and I had to make that decision."
The board's immediate responsibility was to bring about stability and process matters beyond factions and whether they liked somebody or not, she said.
Tambi had extensive experience in project management, planning and engineering with specialisation in the transport sector. Dixon had 29 years' experience in accounting and auditing.
Both were expected to help implement the airline's turnaround strategy and eliminate poor corporate governance.
Brown said her intervention was aimed at stabilising SAA, which had been loss-making for the past few years.
"The board is an interim board and the intention of the board is for it to take us past this period."
She said the interim period would allow her to understand what was happening at the airline and allow for a turnaround strategist to be appointed.
The goal of the strategist, which she envisioned as more a company than a person, would be to create stronger financial sustainability.
"The essence is SAA should be living off its balance sheet."
On Friday, Brown's department announced that four non-executive SAA board members had resigned following an intention to remove certain members at the upcoming special general meeting.
Brown was acting in her formal capacity as the designated representative of the sole shareholder of the airline, the South African government.
"I can only assume that the members resigned because I was going to remove them anyway. There were many, many various reasons why all the board members resigned and all of them were pleased to have been able to have the opportunity to serve the country and serve the airline," she said.
Brown and Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene were leading an inter-ministerial task team, which included directors general, focusing on the future of the airline.
Sapa