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The failure of South African Airways to show for its meeting in front of the Public Enterprises Portfolio Committee this morning speaks volumes about the state of that parastatal. Indeed, the Committee heard that one of the officials who failed to attend this morning, SAA's Operational Manager Tebogo Tsimane, failed to arrive because she had been thrown off one of SAA's own planes, because of overbookings. The state is running an airliner that cannot even book flights for its own Operational Manager!

The new CEO, for her part, simply failed to pitch up - an ominous and most disappointing start to her tenure at the head of the state airliner.

SAA was scheduled to brief the Portfolio Committee on Public Enterprises at 09h00 this morning on the allegations of air ticket price fixing ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In the end, only one junior SAA official turned up. This person could not give any substance to the main point of the agenda, being the allegations of price fixing among airlines before the World Cup.

The allegations of price fixing against SAA is a very serious issue in and of itself - high prices for air tickets impact on the long term perception of South African tourism at a time when South Africa needs to market itself to the rest of the world. SAA is government owned and R214-million in indemnity transfers from the public purse in 2008/09 - and it already has a sordid history of fraud and anti-competitive behaviour, so it needs to take any hint of impropriety very seriously given this track record. Instead, Parliament is treated with utter disrespect.

This is particularly disappointing behaviour from Siza Mzimela, the new CEO of SAA, has failed to attend her very first session before Parliament. Her behaviour shows disdain towards Parliamentary process. This is indicative of a much larger problem - that parastatals are becoming a law unto themselves, unrepentant about the serious harm done to the economy and without any respect to the Parliament of South Africa. Eskom has already showed that it is not interested in managing its affairs better - now SAA is not willing to come to Parliament and explain the very serious allegations of price fixing.