Deanw
31st May 2005, 09:28
From last nights interview on the MoneyWeb Power Hour:
Piet Taljaard (SAA Pilots Association), Tony Manning (leading business strategist), and Clive Simpkins (communications specialist)
Alec Hogg
MONEYWEB: Time now for our top story. Barry Sergeant has been following, in fact more than following, the article which made headlines in the Sunday Times this weekend, Barry – Khaya Ngqula’s helicopter flips and all. Give us some background.
BARRY SERGEANT: Yes, indeed, Alec. Go back to last Tuesday, when I first contacted Henley Air and discussed with one of the directors the contract that Henley Air had with South African Airways in respect of helicopter hired to South African Airways chief executive, Khaya Ngqula. They indicated that they could not give me any details of the contracts, because they were client-confidential, and suggested that I phone Onkgopotse JJ Tabane at South African Airways, which I did Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. He still hasn’t returned the call. So the Sunday Times ran with the story. He did respond to their queries, but the bottom line is that many hundreds of thousands of rands have been spent on helicopter hire by South African Airways for its chief executive, since the new chief executive took his post in October last year.
MONEYWEB: Didn’t he take it on the position of cutting costs, getting South African Airways back into profit?
BARRY SERGEANT: Very much. That was his mantra, that was his motto, that was the whole story – cutting huge costs out of SAA.
MONEYWEB: It’s a great pleasure to have Pieter Taljaard, who is chairman of the South African Airways Pilots Association, in the studio. Piet, were your surprised at all at the Sunday Times disclosures over the weekend?
PIET TALJAARD: No, I wasn’t surprised at the disclosure – I was surprised at the timing.
MONEYWEB: Why is that?
PIET TALJAARD: Well, since Khaya took over and since the new management took over SAA, we have been given information from various sources throughout the entire period, and the information that was published tied up to a large extent with the information that we have, and we were not aware of the fact that there was that amount of information outside SAA.
MONEYWEB: What is the process? Why is the Pilots Association involved at all in finding ways to make SAA more efficient?
PIET TALJAARD: It’s our lifeline. It’s our airline. Most of us have more than 30 years, or 20 years, or 15 years of flying and working invested in the company. And for us it is absolutely essential that the company remains stable and profitable. We have had our share of managers in the last few years who didn’t produce the goods, and we wouldn’t want another one of those.
MONEYWEB: Now the helicopter flips – supposedly the chief executive is using a helicopter to fly to meetings in Gauteng, where he could use his chauffeured BMW. Is that one of the issues that is concerning the Pilots Association?
PIET TALJAARD: Not really. If one looks at the flips per se – and here we would have to look at the answer Minister Alec Erwin gave – that it is really no concern of anybody else. If every one of those helicopter flights turned out to be specifically for back-to-back meetings, that could be classified as operational necessity. However, if any one of those flights was for private use, that would be a completely different matter. And, far from jumping on the man and going for the throat, one would have to investigate and find out how many of those flights were actually done for private use and how many of them were done purely for business purposes. And that would be an interrogation of sorts, I presume.
MONEYWEB: How have you been encouraged from on high – or have you been encouraged from on high? – to look for inefficiencies at South African Airways?
PIET TALJAARD: We undertook a long time ago, because of our experience in the past with the company, to look for places and to look for instances where there was mismanagement, and where there was management which was done in such a way that it was not to the benefit of the company because we – and if I say “we”, I’m talking about the broader we, all the employees of SAA – we are the people that suffer if mismanagement happens. When Andrew Coleman left with a couple of hundred million rand, we could have bought some aircraft with those, we could have done a lot of other stuff with the money that went that way.
MONEYWEB: Was the installation of a helicopter prevalent in the days of Coleman Andrews, and then continued through?
PIET TALJAARD: To our knowledge, this is the first time that it’s happened.
MONEYWEB: Let’s bring Tony Manning in now. He’s actually in London at the moment, but he is South Africa’s leading business strategist. Always good to have you on the programme, Tony. How important is it that chief executives lead by example, particularly if you are in an instance like this, where South African Airways is trying to cut costs?
TONY MANNING: Alec, I know nothing about this story, because I have been out of the country. But, in general, I think it’s very important for CEOs to walk their talk, as it were, because it’s very difficult, when they say one thing and are seen to do another thing, for them to get people to buy into what they are trying to do.
MONEYWEB: What would your advice be, then, given what you’ve heard – and you’ve only just heard what’s going on in this story. If you were consulting to South African Airways, what would you be suggesting to them right now?
TONY MANNING: I have absolutely no idea, because I really know nothing about the story at all. So I honestly can’t comment, Alec.
MONEYWEB: But in broad terms, though, the authenticity of leadership is critical.
TONY MANNING: Yes, there’s no question. You know, around the world today, it’s becoming a huge issue, and there’s more and more of a spotlight on leaders. So it’s very difficult for them to get away with doing what is not perceived as right by both the workers in a company and all of the other stakeholders. And I think it’s critical that they sort of tow the line in terms of the values that they are trying to drive through the organisation, because, as I said earlier, if they don’t do that, they will find it very difficult to get anybody else to buy in.
MONEYWEB: How far are we behind in South Africa to this global trend?
TONY MANNING: I don’t think far behind at all. I think that there’s a disturbing thing happening, though. I think just generally around the world you will always find somebody who will try and bend the rules. This sort of thing is human nature. But I think there’s a disturbing issue in South Africa which is a question of values, where quite a lot of people might say that it would be OK for a chief executive to drive in an extremely expensive motor car, a Maybach, for example, while cutting costs in a business, because he is the chief executive. And I think ultimately that’s going to come back and bite organisations. So I think there’s a values debate which is going to be a very, very big issue in South Africa in the future.
MONEYWEB: Our thanks to leading business strategist, Tony Manning. Well, our leading communications strategist in the country, Clive Simpkins, is with us in the studio. Clive, just to pick up on what Barry was saying – he tried on three successive days to get comment on the story from South African Airways. As a result, from Moneyweb’s side, we didn’t run with the story. But then, from what come on in the Sunday Times, one clearly sees that South African Airways is taking a particular strategy in this.
CLIVE SIMPKINS: What I find fascinating is that Onkgopotse JJ Tabane is usually very forthright and forthcoming in the media, in response to any criticism aimed at the airline – and for the first time, he’s actually hidden behind things like “we don’t discuss financial details with the press, we don’t talk the CEOs schedule with the press”. And something I would really like to know from Piet Taljaard, for example, is what this their reaction to apparently Khaya Ngqula actually using a R100 000 for a flight between France and England when he could have apparently made the same trip for about R2 000 on a scheduled airline. That was part of the Sunday Times report. I don’t think Maria Ramos, for example, would have made trips like this. I don’t know if any CEO whose diary is so shockingly back to back, be it Lazarus Zim or a Tony Trahar of Anglo American, would actually require a helicopter to get between appointments. This sounds, along with the house in France for example, to me, like a case of conspicuous consumption. And when you ally this to the fact that the CE of SAA has told staff to use a cheaper brand of coffee, something is radically wrong.
MONEYWEB: Piet, what is the feeling within the airline right now?
PIET TALJAARD: It is almost one of disbelief. I returned from overseas this morning and I didn’t have time to talk to too many people. But the ones that I spoke to are absolutely flabbergasted about the whole debacle, as it were. And to answer the other question, if it is true that that aircraft was rented and there was a cheaper one available, it would be gross misspending of money. One would have to look into it to see if it’s true. But if it was true, it would not be conducive for good leadership.
MONEYWEB: So the facts have still not come to the fore. Clive, from your perspective, when do you hide the facts, when do you hide the truth, and when do you communicate?
CLIVE SIMPKINS: Alec, you know what I would do – if I were heading up an organisation like that, and you really were looking at cost-cutting, offering people packages, trimming the excess fat and, according to the latest reports today, for example, bringing on board a raft of people to improve the efficiency of the organisation, I would become the poster child for economy, for judicious spending, for doing the exact opposite of what we are reading about here. So whether a lot of this can be supported or not is irrelevant. It’s a perceptual issue. It looks like it’s a case of there are two sets of rules here. One for me, the CEO, and one for the rest of you. And what I would have done, were I Tabane here, his PR guy, when these trips were necessitated, if they were, and you really had to charter a plane between centres for some reason, I would have released that to the media at the time, along with the rationale. So you wouldn’t have had a bag of things that suddenly fell out of the closet when it was opened. You would have had a progressive discussion and progressive transparent revelation to the media of your intentions behind these various items of expenditure, because you would have then been able to justify them. Now what we’re getting is the PR people putting heavy spin on it and hiding behind the usual thing of, “oh well, we don’t talk about this stuff in public”. That’s nonsense. We own South African Airways, we pay for it with our jolly taxes, unless I’m mistaken. So these people are our employees, they have an obligation to us to account for the expenditure.
MONEYWEB: And we’ve been paying for it for quite some number of years through our jolly taxes, as you put it. What about Maria Ramos’s role in this? We did try and get hold of her – in fact our producer this evening got hold of Transnet and was told, “We don’t comment on South African Airways affairs”.
CLIVE SIMPKINS: And she might not. I mean she is Miss Fiscal Probity herself. So I think that this could be a very embarrassing thing for her to have to handle, because of where she’s gone in and looked at cost-cutting on all sorts of fronts. The airline for some reason has always been the bad egg when it’s come to wasting money, and I love one of the comments here, where they said in the Sunday media, “We’re in a billion-rand business, so we can’t be small players”. Something that shocked me was Khaya Ngqula is alleged to have said, “We have a shareholder with deep pockets”. Now that’s a dreadful statement to make, because I don’t care how deep the shareholders’ pockets are, you have an obligation to protect the interests of your shareholders, not to think, well, they have deep pockets, so we can go on spending. That’s unacceptable.
Continued on next post ...
Continued from previous post ...
MONEYWEB: Piet Taljaard, have any of these issues ever been raised publicly with Khaya Ngqula?
PIET TALJAARD: We have raised some issues pertaining to the daily administration – not these particular issues, no. The issues that we raised were daily stuff pertaining to our operation, etc, and problems that we have with flight operations. We deal primarily with flight operations. Of late, we’ve had more and more information given to us by outside sources, and by inside sources. And we are having these things checked out. One cannot take anything that is given to you and run with it, without checking it out. But, as time goes past, more and more people are feeding us more and more information.
MONEYWEB: So what happens from here?
PIET TALJAARD: It would depend pretty much on the reaction that comes from higher authority, from Minister Alec Erwin’s office, and from Maria’s office, I reckon. If they keep quiet and everybody else keeps quiet, they might try to ignore this thing into oblivion.
MONEYWEB: But you will be looking for the facts and presumably disclosing them?
PIET TALJAARD: Well, when we find facts. We are building up a file. And when we find facts and where we find them, eventually we will take them to the correct channels and sort them out.
MONEYWEB: Thanks to Piet Taljaard, chairman of the SAA Pilots Association, to leading business strategist Tony Manning, and to leading communications strategist Clive Simpkins, shedding some light on the South African Airways story which headlined the Sunday Times this weekend. It’s all to do with governance – in this case governing taxpayers’ money.
Piet Taljaard (SAA Pilots Association), Tony Manning (leading business strategist), and Clive Simpkins (communications specialist)
Alec Hogg
MONEYWEB: Time now for our top story. Barry Sergeant has been following, in fact more than following, the article which made headlines in the Sunday Times this weekend, Barry – Khaya Ngqula’s helicopter flips and all. Give us some background.
BARRY SERGEANT: Yes, indeed, Alec. Go back to last Tuesday, when I first contacted Henley Air and discussed with one of the directors the contract that Henley Air had with South African Airways in respect of helicopter hired to South African Airways chief executive, Khaya Ngqula. They indicated that they could not give me any details of the contracts, because they were client-confidential, and suggested that I phone Onkgopotse JJ Tabane at South African Airways, which I did Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. He still hasn’t returned the call. So the Sunday Times ran with the story. He did respond to their queries, but the bottom line is that many hundreds of thousands of rands have been spent on helicopter hire by South African Airways for its chief executive, since the new chief executive took his post in October last year.
MONEYWEB: Didn’t he take it on the position of cutting costs, getting South African Airways back into profit?
BARRY SERGEANT: Very much. That was his mantra, that was his motto, that was the whole story – cutting huge costs out of SAA.
MONEYWEB: It’s a great pleasure to have Pieter Taljaard, who is chairman of the South African Airways Pilots Association, in the studio. Piet, were your surprised at all at the Sunday Times disclosures over the weekend?
PIET TALJAARD: No, I wasn’t surprised at the disclosure – I was surprised at the timing.
MONEYWEB: Why is that?
PIET TALJAARD: Well, since Khaya took over and since the new management took over SAA, we have been given information from various sources throughout the entire period, and the information that was published tied up to a large extent with the information that we have, and we were not aware of the fact that there was that amount of information outside SAA.
MONEYWEB: What is the process? Why is the Pilots Association involved at all in finding ways to make SAA more efficient?
PIET TALJAARD: It’s our lifeline. It’s our airline. Most of us have more than 30 years, or 20 years, or 15 years of flying and working invested in the company. And for us it is absolutely essential that the company remains stable and profitable. We have had our share of managers in the last few years who didn’t produce the goods, and we wouldn’t want another one of those.
MONEYWEB: Now the helicopter flips – supposedly the chief executive is using a helicopter to fly to meetings in Gauteng, where he could use his chauffeured BMW. Is that one of the issues that is concerning the Pilots Association?
PIET TALJAARD: Not really. If one looks at the flips per se – and here we would have to look at the answer Minister Alec Erwin gave – that it is really no concern of anybody else. If every one of those helicopter flights turned out to be specifically for back-to-back meetings, that could be classified as operational necessity. However, if any one of those flights was for private use, that would be a completely different matter. And, far from jumping on the man and going for the throat, one would have to investigate and find out how many of those flights were actually done for private use and how many of them were done purely for business purposes. And that would be an interrogation of sorts, I presume.
MONEYWEB: How have you been encouraged from on high – or have you been encouraged from on high? – to look for inefficiencies at South African Airways?
PIET TALJAARD: We undertook a long time ago, because of our experience in the past with the company, to look for places and to look for instances where there was mismanagement, and where there was management which was done in such a way that it was not to the benefit of the company because we – and if I say “we”, I’m talking about the broader we, all the employees of SAA – we are the people that suffer if mismanagement happens. When Andrew Coleman left with a couple of hundred million rand, we could have bought some aircraft with those, we could have done a lot of other stuff with the money that went that way.
MONEYWEB: Was the installation of a helicopter prevalent in the days of Coleman Andrews, and then continued through?
PIET TALJAARD: To our knowledge, this is the first time that it’s happened.
MONEYWEB: Let’s bring Tony Manning in now. He’s actually in London at the moment, but he is South Africa’s leading business strategist. Always good to have you on the programme, Tony. How important is it that chief executives lead by example, particularly if you are in an instance like this, where South African Airways is trying to cut costs?
TONY MANNING: Alec, I know nothing about this story, because I have been out of the country. But, in general, I think it’s very important for CEOs to walk their talk, as it were, because it’s very difficult, when they say one thing and are seen to do another thing, for them to get people to buy into what they are trying to do.
MONEYWEB: What would your advice be, then, given what you’ve heard – and you’ve only just heard what’s going on in this story. If you were consulting to South African Airways, what would you be suggesting to them right now?
TONY MANNING: I have absolutely no idea, because I really know nothing about the story at all. So I honestly can’t comment, Alec.
MONEYWEB: But in broad terms, though, the authenticity of leadership is critical.
TONY MANNING: Yes, there’s no question. You know, around the world today, it’s becoming a huge issue, and there’s more and more of a spotlight on leaders. So it’s very difficult for them to get away with doing what is not perceived as right by both the workers in a company and all of the other stakeholders. And I think it’s critical that they sort of tow the line in terms of the values that they are trying to drive through the organisation, because, as I said earlier, if they don’t do that, they will find it very difficult to get anybody else to buy in.
MONEYWEB: How far are we behind in South Africa to this global trend?
TONY MANNING: I don’t think far behind at all. I think that there’s a disturbing thing happening, though. I think just generally around the world you will always find somebody who will try and bend the rules. This sort of thing is human nature. But I think there’s a disturbing issue in South Africa which is a question of values, where quite a lot of people might say that it would be OK for a chief executive to drive in an extremely expensive motor car, a Maybach, for example, while cutting costs in a business, because he is the chief executive. And I think ultimately that’s going to come back and bite organisations. So I think there’s a values debate which is going to be a very, very big issue in South Africa in the future.
MONEYWEB: Our thanks to leading business strategist, Tony Manning. Well, our leading communications strategist in the country, Clive Simpkins, is with us in the studio. Clive, just to pick up on what Barry was saying – he tried on three successive days to get comment on the story from South African Airways. As a result, from Moneyweb’s side, we didn’t run with the story. But then, from what come on in the Sunday Times, one clearly sees that South African Airways is taking a particular strategy in this.
CLIVE SIMPKINS: What I find fascinating is that Onkgopotse JJ Tabane is usually very forthright and forthcoming in the media, in response to any criticism aimed at the airline – and for the first time, he’s actually hidden behind things like “we don’t discuss financial details with the press, we don’t talk the CEOs schedule with the press”. And something I would really like to know from Piet Taljaard, for example, is what this their reaction to apparently Khaya Ngqula actually using a R100 000 for a flight between France and England when he could have apparently made the same trip for about R2 000 on a scheduled airline. That was part of the Sunday Times report. I don’t think Maria Ramos, for example, would have made trips like this. I don’t know if any CEO whose diary is so shockingly back to back, be it Lazarus Zim or a Tony Trahar of Anglo American, would actually require a helicopter to get between appointments. This sounds, along with the house in France for example, to me, like a case of conspicuous consumption. And when you ally this to the fact that the CE of SAA has told staff to use a cheaper brand of coffee, something is radically wrong.
MONEYWEB: Piet, what is the feeling within the airline right now?
PIET TALJAARD: It is almost one of disbelief. I returned from overseas this morning and I didn’t have time to talk to too many people. But the ones that I spoke to are absolutely flabbergasted about the whole debacle, as it were. And to answer the other question, if it is true that that aircraft was rented and there was a cheaper one available, it would be gross misspending of money. One would have to look into it to see if it’s true. But if it was true, it would not be conducive for good leadership.
MONEYWEB: So the facts have still not come to the fore. Clive, from your perspective, when do you hide the facts, when do you hide the truth, and when do you communicate?
CLIVE SIMPKINS: Alec, you know what I would do – if I were heading up an organisation like that, and you really were looking at cost-cutting, offering people packages, trimming the excess fat and, according to the latest reports today, for example, bringing on board a raft of people to improve the efficiency of the organisation, I would become the poster child for economy, for judicious spending, for doing the exact opposite of what we are reading about here. So whether a lot of this can be supported or not is irrelevant. It’s a perceptual issue. It looks like it’s a case of there are two sets of rules here. One for me, the CEO, and one for the rest of you. And what I would have done, were I Tabane here, his PR guy, when these trips were necessitated, if they were, and you really had to charter a plane between centres for some reason, I would have released that to the media at the time, along with the rationale. So you wouldn’t have had a bag of things that suddenly fell out of the closet when it was opened. You would have had a progressive discussion and progressive transparent revelation to the media of your intentions behind these various items of expenditure, because you would have then been able to justify them. Now what we’re getting is the PR people putting heavy spin on it and hiding behind the usual thing of, “oh well, we don’t talk about this stuff in public”. That’s nonsense. We own South African Airways, we pay for it with our jolly taxes, unless I’m mistaken. So these people are our employees, they have an obligation to us to account for the expenditure.
MONEYWEB: And we’ve been paying for it for quite some number of years through our jolly taxes, as you put it. What about Maria Ramos’s role in this? We did try and get hold of her – in fact our producer this evening got hold of Transnet and was told, “We don’t comment on South African Airways affairs”.
CLIVE SIMPKINS: And she might not. I mean she is Miss Fiscal Probity herself. So I think that this could be a very embarrassing thing for her to have to handle, because of where she’s gone in and looked at cost-cutting on all sorts of fronts. The airline for some reason has always been the bad egg when it’s come to wasting money, and I love one of the comments here, where they said in the Sunday media, “We’re in a billion-rand business, so we can’t be small players”. Something that shocked me was Khaya Ngqula is alleged to have said, “We have a shareholder with deep pockets”. Now that’s a dreadful statement to make, because I don’t care how deep the shareholders’ pockets are, you have an obligation to protect the interests of your shareholders, not to think, well, they have deep pockets, so we can go on spending. That’s unacceptable.
Continued on next post ...
Continued from previous post ...
MONEYWEB: Piet Taljaard, have any of these issues ever been raised publicly with Khaya Ngqula?
PIET TALJAARD: We have raised some issues pertaining to the daily administration – not these particular issues, no. The issues that we raised were daily stuff pertaining to our operation, etc, and problems that we have with flight operations. We deal primarily with flight operations. Of late, we’ve had more and more information given to us by outside sources, and by inside sources. And we are having these things checked out. One cannot take anything that is given to you and run with it, without checking it out. But, as time goes past, more and more people are feeding us more and more information.
MONEYWEB: So what happens from here?
PIET TALJAARD: It would depend pretty much on the reaction that comes from higher authority, from Minister Alec Erwin’s office, and from Maria’s office, I reckon. If they keep quiet and everybody else keeps quiet, they might try to ignore this thing into oblivion.
MONEYWEB: But you will be looking for the facts and presumably disclosing them?
PIET TALJAARD: Well, when we find facts. We are building up a file. And when we find facts and where we find them, eventually we will take them to the correct channels and sort them out.
MONEYWEB: Thanks to Piet Taljaard, chairman of the SAA Pilots Association, to leading business strategist Tony Manning, and to leading communications strategist Clive Simpkins, shedding some light on the South African Airways story which headlined the Sunday Times this weekend. It’s all to do with governance – in this case governing taxpayers’ money.