South African Airways lost money for years — and got R38B in bailouts anyway

South African Airways (SAA), the country's national carrier, spent years losing money and being rescued by its owner, the South African government. The funding was enormous: from April 2018 the government injected R38.1 billion into the airline, on top of bailouts stretching back many years before that. The airline kept flying, but it kept losing money, and the cost kept landing on the public purse.

By late 2019 the position was no longer sustainable. On 5 December 2019 the SAA board resolved to place the airline under business rescue — a formal process, under South Africa's companies law, to restructure a company that cannot pay its debts. The government said the aim was a 'radical restructuring' to make the airline financially and operationally sustainable and to reduce its 'ongoing impact on the fiscus', and it guaranteed billions of rand of post-commencement finance to keep the airline operating during the process.

The rescue ran for years. It was substantially implemented by 2021, and the airline eventually emerged with the help of a further R10.4 billion bailout — but it was still not on stable ground. The auditor-general's findings showed why the money had not fixed the problem: irregular expenditure at the airline had stood at R22 billion in 2017-18 and had doubled to R44.5 billion by 2022.

SAA is the textbook case of bailout dependence. Repeated injections of public money kept the airline flying without fixing the losses and mismanagement that caused them; the funding treated the symptom, and the symptom kept returning, until a formal rescue process had to step in where a decade of bailouts had not.