Ockie
Resident Lead Bender
South African Airways (SAA) continues to draw media attention for all the wrong reasons. The SAA board has certainly made a comedy of errors. The most recent fiasco centres on the qualifications of acting CEO, Nico Bezuidenhout, which apparently have been overstated on his CV and in SAA annual reports.
There is no justification for overstating qualifications. It’s cheating. Yet, the practice is quite endemic in a country like ours with an unemployment rate of 25.5%, where the competition for jobs is brutally fierce. From a small lie, to deceit, it seems to be the key to opportunity, money and survival.
So, people cheat on tax returns, social grant applications, they lie to themselves that things okay when they’re in a financial mess and social crisis.
As tempting as it is to lie on one’s CV or job application, the risks are not worth it. There are many examples of people who embellished their CV’s with a few white lies but it eventually came back to bite them. Names such as Hlaudi Motsoeneng, SABC chief of operations, Ellen Tshabalala, SABC chairperson, and of course Pallo Jordan come to mind.
Years of hard work, of building a good reputation, squandered in the ignominy of being written off as a liar. This is quite a high price to pay.
On the flip side, it needs to be said that the mass hysteria around people’s qualification stems from a self-induced inferiority complex as South Africans about our credentials. Constantly downgraded and relegated by the rest of the world, we’ve developed an inane obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) for analysis paralysis about everybody’s credibility. The media is on a high code red alert as a self-appointed “knowledge watchdog”.
The “trivia police” a.k.a. the DA has chronic anxiety to fire people without qualifications. Their mission appears to be to critically expose credentials of every antagonist. Awash in fear-mongering, these outfits are calling for Bezuidenhout’s head but SAA has come out in his defence.
Track record
In this instance, the SAA board got it right. The board should be commended, not criticised, for making an appointment not based on political correctness but competency. Minister of public enterprises, Lynne Brown, has handled the situation at SAA with tenacity.
I have known Nico Bezuidenhout as a colleague whilst working with him at Ticketweb (Pty) Ltd, the company that pioneered online ticketing in South Africa, where he was Operations Director in 1999. He has an impeccable work ethic, tremendous integrity and utmost professionalism. It’s one of the reasons why he was head-hunted at the time to head up Mango, SAA’s no-frills airline.
No-one can dispute that Bezuidenhout has done an outstanding job as Mango Chief Executive, despite a difficult climate for airline carriers where the likes of 1Time and Nationwide have crashed. Mango remains firmly robust as a low-cost airline competitor.
Bezuidenhout has my vote of confidence as the best man for the job of CEO and there’s no doubt in my mind that he, with the board’s support, can turn around the embattled national airline carrier. His track record within SAA speaks for itself whereas his predecessors left a beaten trail of gross mismanagement and operational blunders.
The trivia police constantly lament the ANC’s apparent jobs-for-pals policy but they overlook the reality of the dearth of real talent in South Africa. Most qualified South Africans in high-profile positions are products of a broken education system. We have a bigger skills shortage dilemma than an unemployment crisis.
The DA insists that someone with “real” qualifications should be appointed. What they really want is some over-qualified but incompetent crony for the job. We are a developing country confronted by many dystopian challenges such placing a person with the right mix of skill, experience and qualifications, especially one to head up a troubled airline.
Bezuidenhout and the SAA board need some latitude, free from acrimony and political bias, to carry out its mandate. We wish them god speed and all the best,
http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/SAA-Got-It-Right-20141130
