Former SAA board member Yakhe Kwinana says she harbours no hard feelings toward retired Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.
The retired justice proverbially nailed Kwinana to the cross for all to see in his State Capture Commission report.
He further recommended that Kwinana be investigated for irregularities at SAA and SAA Technical (SAAT). Kwinana once chaired the board SAAT. This recommendation has culminated in Kwinana facing all sorts of troubles since.
The SA Institute for Chartered Accountants (Saica) resolved to remove Kwinana from the roll of chartered accountants and fined her R6.1-milion.
Kwinana says Zondo had a mandate to nail certain people including herself and he did exactly that so hating him was not worth sacrificing her internal peace for.
If she were to bump into Zondo in the shopping mall or anywhere in the public space, she would be kind to the man and share a joke with him.
“I do not bear grudges and that is why I have not been admitted to a depression clinic. I always say, ‘God forgive them for they do not know what they are doing’,” said Kwinana during a wide-ranging conversation with Sunday World Engage.
“Basically, I would greet Chief Justice Zondo and joke about the fat cakes, about a lot of things like when he wanted to cry saying Zimbabwe had suffered like South Africa did when SAA employed a Zimbabwean who was anti-transformation.
“I would laugh about that. I harbour no hard feelings against Zondo, he was doing his job, and he had a mandate, if he had, which I think he had. He carried out his state capture mandate.”
Kwinana insists that she does not regret a single decision she was part of at the national airline despite Zondo’s damning findings.
If given a chance, she would repeat those decisions without hesitation.
Among other decisions that Zondo chided Kwinana for was the decision of the then SAA board to cancel a catering tender awarded to LSG Sky Chefs, a subsidiary of German Airline Lufthansa.
The SAA board, which Kwinana was part of, decided to stop the award and insisted on the improvement of SAA-owned Air Chefs to protect jobs.
In this incident, Kwinana used fat cakes as an example to explain to Zondo. She was later ridiculed about it on social media.
“We stopped that transaction. This is one of the best decisions that we made. The fat cakes story, when they said we stopped it incorrectly so, I was saying to Zondo that should have gone to section 56 of the PFMA and Zondo did not understand what section 56 says,” said Kwinana.
“Section 56 of the Public Finance Management Act is saying if you discontinue a significant part of the business, that must be approved by the board and by the shareholder. And that did not happen there.
“So, we stopped it because it did not follow the correct process. Secondly, if a South African company is not doing right, we are supposed to make it do things right instead of picking a foreign company and that is why I was making the example of the fat cakes,” she went on.
“That is what I was trying to explain, I was saying if your child is baking fat cakes, you cannot say as a parent I do not like your fat cakes therefore I will go buy next door. You need to say as a parent, my child add sugar, add this and this. [Then] you taste until she perfects it. That is what I was trying to say to Zondo.”
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