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Bop-along sunny days

For me as a youngster with little experience of life outside apartheid South Africa, Bophuthatswana was a magical place when I arrived there in 1989. There was no racial discrimination as it was not formally part of South Africa and was spared its absurd apartheid laws.

Sun City, in the heart of Bophuthatswana, was the gambling and partying mecca of South Africa and a must-see for most international visitors, alongside Victoria Falls, the world's best game parks, Cape Town and the winelands. Mafeking had a vibrant South African expatriate community. We all understood the transparent nonsense of the homeland system but life was good.

My first son was on the way, I had a job I enjoyed, I was earning well and I had the freedom to make changes in the airline and learn along the way. Our office was in the heart of colonial Mafeking. Staff went home for lunch and we complained about traffic if we had to park more than 50 metres from the office.

At the time, any self-respecting African country required a flag carrier and Bophuthatswana was no exception. Hence the formation of Bop Air, a small national carrier for a tiny nation that was recognised as an independent country only by South Africa.

The airline offered Mafeking-Johannesburg and Sun City-Johannesburg flights on modern Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia twin-turboprop aircraft and we operated a Citation jet for Bop's presidential charters. A Piper Chieftain tagged along behind the Citation carrying the luggage of Bophuthatswana leader Lucas Mangope and his entourage; the weight of their baggage exceeded the international individual 20kg limit several times over.

The airline did well commercially, expanding from prop-only operations to jet aircraft. We introduced the 100-seat McDonnell Douglas DC-9 jet aircraft into South Africa, operating on the Sun City-Cape Town and Sun City-Victoria Falls routes.

Bop Air had relied on Bop government subsidies since its inception in the 1980s, but by 1994, with the reincorporation of Bophuthatswana into South Africa, we had become self-sufficient. My role was focused on creating a viable business model: an income-statement that allowed the airline to survive without subsidies.

The integration of Bophuthatswana into South Africa in April 1994, at the dawn of democracy, loosened our shackles. We were ready and willing to take on our competitors in what we naively hoped would be a free-market environment in South Africa's domestic air space.

Our new transport minister responsible for the airline was struggle icon Mac Maharaj. He called Johan and I to a meeting, which we assumed would be an introductory chat. Instead, he proceeded to sanctimoniously lecture us about how the country had changed and we needed to understand that corruption would no longer be tolerated in the new South Africa. This seems a little ironic now, after the events that played out years later during Jacob Zuma's presidency.

Our competitors in the South African domestic market included South African Airways (SAA), Flitestar, Comair and Nationwide. They and we were all vying for the same customers but we were confident we could take them on. We ran a lean operation with lower costs than our rivals and had positioned ourselves as a premium carrier offering superior customer service. However, we soon found out our enthusiasm was premature.

After the demise of Bophuthatswana in 1994, we approached the Air Service Licensing Council to transfer our Bop-issued licence to the South African register. What should have been a routine administrative procedure led to my first interaction with Comair, which hated competition and objected to our application. Rather than rule on the matter, the council postponed the hearing to the following day.

Comair tried to railroad us, offering to withdraw its objection but only if we agreed not to compete against it on any of its routes. Without any deliberation, we refused the offer out of hand; we would not be bullied.

I drafted a press release that evening saying we would not succumb to blackmail and it made the front page of the Business Day newspaper in Johannesburg the following morning. In those wonderful days, we drafted our own press statements without enduring endless interference from public relations advisers creating meaningless paragraphs devoid of substance.

That morning, as Bop Air managing director Johan Borstlap and I waited outside the licensing council offices in Vermeulen Street in Pretoria city centre, Piet van Hoven, the Comair managing director, suddenly stormed up. By then, Piet had been in charge of Comair for more than 15 years. Slight of build and with a trademark gold tooth, he took no prisoners and had a reputation as a straight shooter.

Piet demanded that Johan retract the blackmail allegations we had made against Comair. To my surprise, Johan crumbled. He went red in the face, a sure sign (as I had learned from working with him) that he was about to deliver a whopper. He denied that we had made the allegations and blamed poor press reporting.

Piet was not impressed and waved a copy of our press release in Johan's face. Watching the two, I quite enjoyed the drama. I believe business is about people, not textbooks, and with such straight talking by Piet we knew exactly where we stood. I also felt instinctively that Comair's bullying on the matter was all bluster and no bite.

It was a pity Johan buckled. I believed he should have responded with more conviction and told Piet to get lost. But in future battles I observed this pattern of behaviour between Piet and Johan repeating itself.

This dispute with Comair marked the start of five years of enmity between the two airlines and the individuals who led them. And the acrimony would prove to have far-reaching consequences on both sides.

That same morning, for reasons I still don't fully understand, the licensing council once again refused to rule on our application, putting us in a real bind. It forced us into an urgent high court action in Pretoria, as our licence was due to expire at midnight that day. No licence, no airline.

We had a brilliant advocate, Glenn Turner. I thought he wiped the floor with Comair's advocate, Barry Roux (later of Oscar Pistorius murder trial fame). And to our immense relief, Judge Willem van der Merwe (later of Jacob Zuma rape trial fame) ruled in our favour at about midnight.

While we were grateful that our planes were not going to be grounded, I recall watching Piet express his displeasure in no uncertain terms to a pale Roux.

Johan and I returned to Mafeking to a heroes' welcome from our staff, who were dancing and singing as they greeted us at the airport. I am less happy to relate that 25 years later, when I had become an airline CEO myself, singing and dancing staff would be demanding my head on a chopping block.

It was a David-and-Goliath victory for little Bop Air against mighty Comair. Ironically, at the time Comair had positioned itself in TV adverts as a David fighting against its own mighty Goliath in the shape of SAA. The state-owned airline had relied on billions of rand in government funding for many years and operated as a monopoly without ever making a profit.

We were now motivated, willing and able to take on all the big boys. The nation of Bop was no more, so our first step was to change our name to Sun Air. We hoped it would further entrench our association with the Sun International group, which owned hotels at all the destinations we served.

The next step in our strategy was to acquire more DC-9s and enter the lucrative Johannesburg-Cape Town market, competing directly against the incumbents on the route: Flitestar, Comair, Nationwide and SAA.

It was a happy time for me. I had a growing young family and as someone who is inherently optimistic, I was enjoying the job. Johan was a practical leader and an experienced pilot who was willing to share his knowledge of the industry.

I overlooked some of his idiosyncrasies, as he did mine. His tendency to blurt out the odd whopper earned him the affectionate nickname 'Pinokes' (Pinocchio). Bolstered by Rodney James, who ran our technical division, I was confident we had a three-man executive team at Sun Air that could successfully take on our bigger rivals.

I fixed the income statement, we were soon profitable, solvent and generating good cash returns, and our staff were well motivated. We ran a slick operation with the best customer service in the market. All good things, however, come to an end.

Over the years, Johan's wife had often helped on a part-time basis, doing secretarial and admin work when needed. She was part of the Sun Air family. Then Johan decided to appoint her as quality manager, a new position. It was not clear to me why we needed anyone in that role, and even if we did, why proper recruitment processes were not followed.

Her job would be to evaluate all customer service activities and report to Johan on how well the airline's managers were performing.

Johan sought my support for the appointment but - to his surprise - I firmly advised him against the idea. He protested that his wife was passionate about the airline and could do the job, and he didn't seem to comprehend that it might be considered problematic. After our discussion, however, I assumed the matter was settled.

By this time, I had moved up the ranks and was the...