It is no longer tenable for the people of South Africa to continue to fund South African Airways (SAA) and SAA board chairperson Dudu Miyeni’s perpetual mismanagement, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Sunday.

A report in Sunday’s City Press newspaper, which revealed that SAA’s annual financial losses had increased from R2.5-billion to R4.7-billion compared to the previous financial year, reaffirmed the DA’s call for Miyeni to be fired and for the “money-sucking” state-owned airline to be privatised, DA spokesperson Natasha Mazzone said.

She would approach Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and implore him to begin the process of selling off SAA, as it was no longer tenable for citizens to continue to fund SAA and Miyeni’s mismanagement.

It was confirmed earlier this month that SAA had made a further loss of R648-million in the first six months of the current financial year and was looking for further guarantees from government to the tune of R5-billion so it could finalise its 2014/15 financial statements. This followed National Treasury granting SAA a further guarantee of R6.5-billion just last December, she said.

“At a time when service delivery is falling by the wayside, the future of the country’s students at higher learning institutions is being compromised, and job opportunities decreasing year on year, the government can no longer afford to keep SAA in the air.

“SAA has become accustomed to blank cheques from Treasury to fund an airline which shows no clear signs of recovery at the expense of funding programmes to grow our economy, increase our national skills base, and ultimately create jobs,” Mazzone said.

It would be amiss to label SAA a state asset as it was in fact a state liability. The burden for propping up SAA could no longer be placed on the shoulders of taxpayers, who would rather see increased funding for the delivery of quality services, the funding of higher education, and among other things, the refurbishment and building of better health care facilities, she said.