South Africa's nine biggest airports, OR Tambo, Cape Town and King Shaka among them, have been run by a stand-in since the end of June. From 1 November they get a permanent chief executive, and he knows the building. Siphamandla Mthethwa, a chartered accountant, was finance chief at Airports Company South Africa from 2020 to 2023, and Cabinet signed off his return on 23 September. He takes over from Charles Shilowa, who has been acting since Mpumi Mpofu reached the end of her six-year contract.
His first stint began with almost nothing flying. He arrived on 1 May 2020, when lockdown had grounded the planes and shut down airport operations. ACSA says he led a R6 billion funding programme in those years, including a R1.8 billion bond sold with no government guarantee behind it. The state owns about three-quarters of ACSA, so that meant lenders were taking the company's own word for it.
The years since have been less settled. He left ACSA for ArcelorMittal South Africa and resigned in less than two months, citing personal reasons, and most recently he was finance chief at the African Exploration Mining and Finance Corporation, a state-owned miner inside the Central Energy Fund.
The runways, fuel lines and scanners on his list
Board chair Irvin Phenyane put ACSA's approved building programme at the top of the new chief executive's to-do list. The first R15 billion is set for the three years to March 2029, and ACSA has said it could lift total spending from R21 billion to R37 billion in the years to March 2031. Those are one programme growing, not three budgets to add up.
Most of it is the kind of work nobody photographs. At OR Tambo there are jet fuel lines, landing systems and cargo warehouses, and across the network there are runways to fix and realign and new machines to screen checked bags. The scanners are the part travellers should notice, because they are meant to shorten the queue at security.
A company with money to spend again
ACSA has now made a profit three years in a row. In the year to March 2025 it earned R1.1 billion, more than double the year before, and in its 2026 year 20.58 million passengers flew out of its airports, 98% of the pre-pandemic number. Phenyane's pitch is that Mthethwa returns "not simply to the ACSA he left", but to one "rebuilding from a position of renewed financial strength".
The target he inherits is 42 million passengers and 1.24 million tonnes of cargo a year by March 2030. The first of the R15 billion is due to be spent from 2027.
