I am sitting in a Kenya Airways Boeing 787, flying from New York to Nairobi, and I am seething.

Kenya Airways, I read in the excellent The East African newspaper, has just declared a $42m profit. All I can think is: how did South Africa manage, in the space of just a few years in the 2010s, to plunge a profitable SAA into financial ruin? How did we make a useless, ill-equipped, politically connected ANC apparatchik chair of the board of such a precious entity, leading to its bankruptcy in 2019? How did people like the disgraced accountant Yakhe Kwinana end up on the board of such a key state-owned enterprise (SOE)?..

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