What if we told foreigners to voetsek? We have fallen victim to the illusion of scarcity. And we are led to wrongly believe immigrants are a threat.
SAA
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Please, Mr President, keep us weak at the knees
Dear Mr President, Before launching into this letter’s raison d’être, I want you to know that I am truly fond of you. Truly. I want to squeeze your plump cheeks, sit across the dinner table from you just to hear you speak, and give you a good old bear hug at the end of the […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
Metrics in Project SAA: What you measure matters
By Dale van der Lingen Inspired by the recent movie Ford vs. Ferrari, which retells Ford Racing’s overthrow of the ever-dominant Ferrari in the 1960s at Le Mans, and the Springbok’s epic turnaround to win last year’s Rugby World Cup, I’ve written this series of pieces to show that not all is lost with our […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics, Tech
Can SAA attract the “one percenters”?
By Dale van der Lingen My previous piece here centred on lessons for South African Airways (SAA) from Ford’s upending of Ferrari’s decades long dominance at Le Mans in the 1960s and our very own Springboks’ miraculous turnaround from a place where, to paraphrase Mike Tindell’s post-match analysis, they couldn’t win a raffle 18 months […]
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Fixing SAA: State-owned does not have to mean state-run
By Dale van der Lingen I love going to the movies, enjoying the popcorn, and switching off my phone for the duration of the movie. The cinemas, along with flying, are two of the last escapes we have from the bombardment of life in the smartphone age. This last weekend I sat down to watch […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Tech
The aeronautics behind SAA’s unprofitability
Let me just say it straight up — neither President Jacob Zuma nor SAA board chairperson Dudu Myeni are to be blamed for the operational unprofitability of SAA. South Africans are currently rallying together in the #ZumaMustFall campaign, which was in part triggered by the removal of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister, allegedly due to […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it an SAA death spiral?
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that South African Airways is in a financial death spiral and that unless the heavy hand of incompetence — that of board chair Dudu Myeni — it is removed from the rudder, it may crash and burn. There’s a clue in the fact that […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were flying SAA?
Forget about the cryptic Nostradamus if you want to descry the shape of the future in the utterances of the past. Look rather at an unknown medieval English riddler who with uncanny foresight predicted the excesses almost 400 years later of the South African government. The riddle is about a man with four wives on […]
Posted inNews/Politics
SA Post Office – It’s time to pull the plug
How long do you keep a family member on life support? Especially one that is utterly useless? We are speaking here of Auntie Sapo, or the South African Post Office, although the question applies equally to her infirm, twilight zone siblings, Telkom and South African Airways. Despite a hardwired organisational tendency towards profligacy, state entities […]
Posted inGeneral
Get me to the Gautrain on time
So I need to travel to Cape Town. Just for a day, to give a talk to a school on social media. I might squeeze in a couple of other meetings to make the most of the fact that I’m there. At most, booking a flight should take me five minutes, right? As it turns […]