Johannesburg - The public enterprises department denied on
Tuesday that "things are falling apart" at SA Airways following a
string of resignations.
"There is an appearance of things falling apart, but
things are not falling apart at SAA," public enterprises director general
Tshediso Matona told SABC radio news.
"The events in our view could have been avoided... are
completely unnecessary."
SAA CEO Siza Mzimela and two other senior managers,
corporate affairs general manager Theuns Potgieter, and general manager for
legal, risk and compliance Sandra Coetzee, resigned from the airline this week.
This came barely two weeks after most of the board -
including chairperson Cheryl Carolus - also quit, saying there was a lack of
support from its shareholder, the public enterprises department.
Matona said the resignations happened while the department
was busy preparing for its annual general meeting.
"We had been engaged with the company through a process
of preparing for the annual general meeting, so when we step outside of
disciplined processes, personality complexes take over, and then in the end we
all lose, because leadership fails," he told the SABC.
Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba said in September
that the state-owned airline needed to present a long-term plan to ensure a
strong and viable financial future.
In early October the National Treasury announced that SAA
had been given a R5bn government guarantee for a recapitalisation exercise.
The SAA board is also busy suing former SAA CEO, Khaya Ngqula, who left the airline in 2009, to recover about R252m from him in four separate claims following a forensic investigation by auditors KPMG.