South Africa has run out of levers on a Zimbabwean debt of more than R900 million to South African Airways (SAA), and is relying on diplomacy to recover it.
Parliament heard last week that there is no timeline for repayment.
Officials from the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Appropriations that they have been brokering talks between ministers of the two countries through the Bi-National Commission. The aim is to persuade Harare to release money owed to South African companies, the national carrier among them.
MPs wanted hard numbers: what foreign governments owe South Africa and how they intend to pay. Neither was given in open session, and the committee took the discussion behind closed doors.
The SAA debt is for tickets sold on the airline’s Harare and Victoria Falls routes. It has built up since 2020, as Zimbabwe battled a shortage of foreign currency. In April, the Auditor-General’s office told Parliament that Zimbabwe owed SAA more than R900 million, and that unpaid sums from foreign countries threatened the airline’s long-term survival.
Across all countries, SAA is owed about R1.4 billion.
Harare has made an offer before. It proposed paying $1 million (about R16.5m) a quarter, a schedule that would have dragged on for more than 16 years. SAA turned it down in 2024.
That same year, South Africa’s transport minister Barbara Creecy told Parliament that the government would consider diplomatic routes to recover the money. When former SAA chief financial officer Lindsay Olitzski retired in March, he said no payments had been received.
SAA is not alone. The International Air Transport Association estimates that airlines had $67 million (about R1.1bn) blocked in Zimbabwe at the end of October 2025, the seventh-highest amount of any country. Worldwide, governments were sitting on $1.2 billion (about R19.8 billion) of airline revenue, 93 percent of it in Africa and the Middle East.
DIRCO chief director Nyameka Goso told MPs that minister Ronald Lamola had written letters and convened ministerial meetings to secure repayment agreements. But she conceded it is difficult to compel other countries to honour what they sign up to, and that political changes in those countries often derail implementation. The department is also struggling to recover toll fees collected at the Beitbridge border post, and South African mining companies are battling to get their money out of other countries.
Committee chairperson Mmusi Maimane was sceptical the money would ever come back. He asked whether the department could impose penalties, and questioned South Africa’s warm relations with governments that, in his view, do not respect constitutional democracy. DIRCO replied that its role is confined to facilitation, that it takes direction from the departments concerned, and that any next step is for political principals to decide.
The debt sits awkwardly alongside a lopsided trade relationship. Trade between the two countries reached about R81 billion in 2025, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has said South Africa sells roughly eight rand of goods to Zimbabwe for every rand it buys. The Bi-National Commission’s fourth session, held in Pretoria in August, produced six agreements. None addressed outstanding debts.