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Harith General Partners is finally getting its airline. The infrastructure investment firm is set to take full control of FlySafair, South Africa’s biggest domestic carrier, two years after its attempt to buy into South African Airways fell apart. This time, the deal stuck.
Harith confirmed it has signed an agreement to buy 100 percent of FlySafair through a new vehicle called Harith Aviation. The price was not disclosed, but the transaction will see FlySafair’s current shareholders walk away from the business.
For Harith, the move is less of a surprise and more of a long time coming. The firm already has deep roots in transport, with investments in Lanseria International Airport and Traxtion, Africa’s largest private rail operator. An airline was the missing piece, and Harith has been open about wanting one for years.
That plan nearly materialised in 2024 when Harith moved to acquire a majority stake in South African Airways. The deal quickly became tangled in politics and regulatory pressure, and Harith eventually walked away. It did not drop the idea of aviation altogether. Instead, it went back to the market and quietly searched for another opportunity.
FlySafair turned out to be the answer. Launched in 2014 with just two aircraft flying between Johannesburg and Cape Town, the airline has grown into the dominant force in South Africa’s domestic skies. Today, it operates more than 30 planes and controls roughly two thirds of all available seats on local routes.
Under the new ownership, FlySafair’s management team will stay in place. Harith says that was non negotiable. The airline’s steady growth, tight cost control and consistent profitability over the past decade were a big part of what made the deal attractive.
FlySafair has not been without controversy. In 2022, rival airlines asked regulators to take a closer look at whether it truly complied with South Africa’s foreign ownership rules. While the airline was presented as majority South African owned, documents showed that Irish company ASL Aviation Holdings still had significant financial exposure to the business.
ASL had structured FlySafair’s ownership so that it kept a 25 percent direct stake, with another 50 percent held by the Safair Investment Trust and the remaining 25 percent placed in an employee share scheme. Regulators questioned whether that structure gave ASL more influence than the law allows, which caps foreign ownership at 25 percent.
Harith’s takeover is expected to settle that debate and clear the path for the airline’s next chapter.
The firm says it plans to support FlySafair’s growth without changing the way it runs its business. The bigger picture is to knit together air, rail and logistics assets into a single, connected transport network across Africa.
After years of trying, Harith has finally landed where it wanted to be.
