A short history of South Africa’s VIP (ab)use of flying

22 Aug 2022

The South African Air Force’s inability to transport President Cyril Ramaphosa to Kinshasa and back safely is a culmination of 20 years of controversy over the issue of transporting VIPs around the world as well as steadily declining levels of competence and an increasingly alarming lack of care within our government. The fact that the President had to use a massive, and expensive, SAA airliner is just the latest sign of the oft-repeated mess that we are in.

On Friday afternoon, the website TimesLIVE published a report that President Cyril Ramaphosa had flown to Kinshasa in an SAA plane. It reported that on the way there the plane, designed to carry hundreds of people, had carried just the President and 11 others. It also said that the trip must have cost about R2.6-million.

On Sunday night, the Defence Ministry published a statement saying that the plane had in fact carried a few more people to Kinshasa, and 55 on the return leg. It also said that the trip had cost only R1.6-million. It said that SAA was the lowest bidder after three different operators provided quotes for the trip.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that the real reason Ramaphosa had to use this plane was that the official presidential jet, Inkwazi, is once again out of service. It’s been widely reported that the SA Air Force has not paid its subscription fees to an avionics service, without which the plane is not considered safe to fly.

It is not clear why these specific subscription fees have not been paid, but this problem is just the latest in a string that goes back some 20 years.

It was in 2002 that the government of the then President, Thabo Mbeki, was reported as trying to buy a new jet for R600-million. This was a huge amount of money at the time and led to outrage.

But much more was to come.

In 2005, this writer watched as the then Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, left Lanseria Airport on a plane to the UAE. There was a huge argument about whether it was a holiday or a working trip. The fact that she took Zola Skweyiya’s wife, Thathu Mazibuku-Skweyiya (Skweyiya was a serving Cabinet Minister at the time), merely added fuel to this easily ignited fire.

In December 2006, it emerged that a special plane had been chartered to fly Mlambo-Ngcuka to the UK at a cost of more than R4.5-million. That led the defence minister at the time, Mosiuoa Lekota, to appoint a special investigation into why his officials had done such a thing.

During the Zuma era, in 2012, it emerged that on one trip to the US, the government had chartered not one, but two planes. One was a backup for the first plane, just in case.

Dangerous scandal

But perhaps the worst and most dangerous scandal involved not a special plane, but a South African Air Force plane.

In 2009, the then Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe, was on a trip to Democratic Republic of the Congo. The plane he was in malfunctioned and had to land at a rarely used airstrip. When it landed, the pilots, who could not see the end of the runway, applied maximum braking power, bursting one of the tyres.

That was just the beginning.

A group of soldiers in the area, seeing a strange and unscheduled plane landing (this was in the DRC, after all), surrounded the plane. They demanded to come on board with their weapons.

One can imagine the tension: a plane carrying the Deputy President of South Africa (who just months before had in fact been the President), on a strange airstrip, in the DRC, in the dark, surrounded by men from another army demanding to be allowed on board.

Eventually, a soldier agreed to go aboard without his gun, before eventually the situation was calmed down.

But even after that, from time to time, a scandal would emerge.

In 2011 came the strange sequel to an earlier drama. In 2004, a group of mercenaries had landed in South Africa planning to go to Zimbabwe and then to Equatorial Guinea to conduct a coup.

They were arrested in Zimbabwe where most of them served time in jail. Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of a former British prime minister, was convicted in South Africa of financing the coup, but allowed to leave the country after paying a hefty fine.

One of those men arrested in Zimbabwe was a South African pilot. It emerged in 2011 that, in fact, this very same pilot had found himself back in an SA Air Force jet, piloting the then President, Jacob Zuma.

That scandal led to the resignation of the secretary for defence, Mpumi Mpofu.

Throughout all of this time, problems involving security and transport have been common.

It is unlikely that many VIP protectors would be happy with a president or deputy president flying on a commercial flight (although it has happened more than once, with Zuma flying to New York on a commercial flight in 2016, and Ramaphosa in 2018).

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This means that technically it is up to the SA Air Force to provide transport. And this is where the repeated failures have been.

For some critics, there may be no more apt symbol of our governance problems than the ones merging simple incompetence with carelessness in times of penury.

The SA Air Force is suffering from the same problems as the rest of the government: it does not have the right resources in the right places, to put it in the mildest terms imaginable. Like the provision of electricity, keeping planes in the sky requires the management of energy supplies and complicated machines with many moving parts. Small mistakes have major consequences, and governance and systems are crucial. Maintenance matters. Experience matters. Competence matters.

Thus, it is hardly a surprise that this problem keeps repeating itself.

More recently, it has been reported that the problems facing the SA Air Force are perhaps worse than ever. And that, along with the rest of the SANDF, it is not able to fulfil its function, leaving South Africa defenceless.

The institution, in serious and multiple distress, instead of using money to repair its problematic planes, or pay its avionics service subscription fees, has to use this money to source civilian aircraft, making its financial situation even worse.

Until governance improves, or until more resources are found, these types of desperate moves are bound to happen again and again. In the process, more public money will be wasted and more public trust will be lost. DM

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