It is up to President Cyril Ramaphosa to reinvigorate and inspire confidence in South Africans from all walks of life in his SONA.

SA can’t use public pensions as a convenient piggy bank to bail out our indebted SOEs and avoid fundamental reforms.

Prescribed assets, on the surface, may seem to be a quick-fix to Eskom’s problems but that would serve only to guarantee poor returns for pensioners. BLSA argues for some hard decisions to be taken now to ensure long-term sustainability of Eskom and other SOEs.

SAA, through the actions of our political players, is now effectively a privatised, inefficient enterprise, a situation caused by a legacy of bad direction by its shareholder.

With a new leadership team in Eskom now in place, it’s important that the focus remains firmly on what the crux of our electricity challenges is: the inability to meet power demand. Regardless of the changes that may come to the almost 97-year old parastatal, this is its inescapable truth.

As difficult a path that business rescue is, and as wary as we are of the unintended consequences, the shareholder’s stance in the SAA matter has put to paid one thing: companies are not too big to fail. Eskom, of course is a special case. This should however not incentivise unions to prolong their rigid approach; rather, they should try and be part of the solution.

Call them friendly to the South African story, or more considerate of the structural fault-lines in our economy, for whatever their reasoning, they’ve resisted following the path of their peers. But come next February, it seems we may have run out of rope if promises of the new political dispensation at the helm of the governing party, ANC, aren’t translated into hard decisions.

SAA and its stakeholders are striking this weekend and the airline will lose about R50m a day, but what we would ask of its shareholder representative that it now back its board and executive in managing its dispute. To intervene now would only strengthen the belief among unions that it is indeed “too big, too fail”, serving to harden positions and in effect hasten SAA’s demise.