SAA could easily and very successfully recruit flight crew from all over Africa. Many of these pilots would already be type rated and need only a bakelite stamp from the jolly old SA CAA. Some might even be women and come from Ethiopia? That's akin to what Air Botswana did some years ago when the company recruited a few Tanzanian F27 first officers and placed them in the left hand seats of their Fokkers, or so it has been told. This did not lead to any diminution of aviation safety, something which seems sometimes or often to be inherently compromised in Africa for reasons too staggeringly incomprehensible to be able to be understood by anyone.