REFLECTIONS ON INKWAZI

Inkwazi, the South African Air Force’s Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) used for VIP transport, has been reliably racking up the flying hours this year. In just the past two weeks before writing this column it flew President Ramaphosa tens of thousands of kilometres in back to back trips to Switzerland, Poland, Russia, and now France without a single hitch or serious snag and quick turnarounds between missions.

- DARREN OLIVIER

YET IT WASN’T THAT LONG ago that the South African Presidency and Minister of Defence under the Zuma administration were deriding the BBJ as ‘unreliable’, ‘unsafe’, ‘too old’, and in urgent need of replacement as it was supposedly no longer up to the job of transporting the president.

Between 2011 and 2017 there were numerous attempts to lease or acquire costly new aircraft to replace it, and the frequent and unnecessary use of chartered aircraft in its place. At the same time a wide group of commentators, self-proclaimed experts, and praise-singers were echoing those arguments in opinion pieces, on social media posts, and in appearances on radio and TV. All are now silent on the matter, with the ‘unreliability’ of the BBJ and purported urgency of replacing it entirely forgotten. None have ever walked back or apologised for their statements.

As the public, we should not be allowing our politicians, commentators, and other public figures to conveniently forget about all this, and we should keep it in mind every time there’s a similar debate around acquisitions, requirements, and security for VIP travel. Once bitten, twice shy, and scepticism should be the public’s default position after all the attempts to mislead it.