The cabinet has appointed two new members to the SAA board and kept two others in line with her goal of creating a more agile group with “harder skills”, Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown has announced.
“Included in that is institutional memory,” she said after SAA’s special general meeting at which six resignations from the board were accepted yesterday.
The new appointments are Dr John Tambi and Anthony Dixon, while the two longest-serving members, chairwoman Duduzile Myeni and Yakhe Kwinana, remain on the board.
Tambi had extensive experience in project management, planning and engineering, with a specialisation in the transport sector. Dixon had 29 years’ experience in accounting and auditing, Brown said.
Tambi and Dixon were expected to help implement the airline’s turnaround strategy and eliminate poor corporate governance.
SAA chief executive Monwabisi Kalawe and chief financial officer Wolf Meyer would also continue serving on the board.
Brown acknowledged the board had been factionalised.
“This is a situation of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Individually, they are intellectually
astute and incredibly hard-working people, but collectively it just didn’t work.”
The board’s immediate responsibility was to bring about stability and process matters beyond factions, she said. Brown said her intervention was aimed at stabilising SAA, which had reported losses for several years.
“The board is an interim board and the intention is to take us past this period.”
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 envisaged would be a company rather than a person, would be to create stronger sustainability.
“The essence is SAA should be living off its balance sheet.”
Airlines across the globe grappled with the same problem. Some were just more subsidised than others.
Brown and Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene are leading an interministerial task team, which includes directors-general, on the future of the airline. The aim was to find different business and financial models, Brown said. An equity partnership would be among the options considered.
The department an-nounced last Friday that four non-executive members of the SAA board had resigned following the signalling of an intention to remove certain members.
“I can only assume that the members resigned because I was going to remove them anyway,” Brown said yesterday. – Sapa