Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs Lancaster?” Phil Connors asks sarcastically in Groundhog Day event – a situation in which a series of unwelcome or tedious events appear to be recurring in exactly the same way. Mrs Lancaster’s response is: “I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.”

If you are a regular reader of this column, you may recall the instalment of December 4, 2015, ‘Goodbye, blue sky’, where I quoted Frank Zappa: “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but, at the very least, you need a beer.” You have the choice of rereading that column or doing what Yogi Berra referred to as ‘déjà vu all over again’ and read this column.

Since the 2015 column, as for beer, SABMiller has since been sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev, which resulted in there being no South African-owned international beer brewing company. The less said about Bafana Bafana, currently languishing in seventy-second position on FIFA’s world rankings, the better. As for nuclear weapons, South Africa has not had any since 1989, if my memory serves me right.

This leaves only an airline, South African Airways (SAA), which dates back to February 1, 1934, when government took over the assets and liabilities of Union Airways. Could this sentimentality be partly why government is seemingly hell-bent on retaining SAA, the flag carrier airline of South Africa, at all costs?

In a 1789 letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” In the instance of South Africa, this quotation should be amended to include “the government’s retention of SAA”, a company that is financially fragile and a serial lossmaker.

In this instalment, I merely need to update the figures; the 2015 article’s narrative requires no update. For 2017, SAA made a financial loss of R3.7-billion, compared with a projected loss of R853-million. This adds to the R4.5-billion loss of 2016, R1.5-billion in 2015, R2.6-billion in 2014 and R1.2-billion loss in 2013. And SAA is requesting a R5-billion financial bail-out.

If you think that things will soon change, think again. According to Deputy Finance Minister Mondli Gungubele, SAA is expected to post losses of R5-billion in 2019 and R2-billion in 2020, with government hoping that the airline will break even in 2021. What is the difference between a ‘hope’ and a ‘dream’?

Apparently, “the path has been tested scientifically”. What does that even mean? It reminds of the lyrics in Talking Heads’ Wild Wild Life: “Things fall apart, it’s scientific.” Apparently, it will cost about R60-billion for government to cut ties with SAA, as opposed to less than that amount to turn the airline around. But what is the economic cost of retaining it? It is the financial (accounting) cost, plus the opportunity cost.

SAA’s catch phrase in the early 1990s was ‘Now we’ll take more care of you’. Taking its present state into consideration, the catch phrase now should be: ‘Now you’ll take more care of us.’

In my estimation, SAA has, since 1994, received a total of R28.3-billion in government bail-out packages, excluding the R5-billion it has requested. Government bail-outs since 2013 amount to R18.35-billion, excluding the R5-billion. As an SAA shareholder, you surely cannot feel too pleased about this. If you were a private investor (shareholder), you would surely have issued your broker with a single-word instruction: “Sell!”

The state of South Africa, according to Zappa’s measure, is reminiscent of a country song. If you want to listen to a cheerful and upbeat country song, you have to play it backwards, for then the man’s wife or girlfriend, or both, returns to him, his horse recovers and loses its limp, his dog reappears from the grave, and he gets his house back and his pick-up truck.