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‘A clear pattern of influence’ — how corporate lobbying has delayed SA's climate policies

15 May 2025

South Africa’s biggest polluting companies have worked behind the scenes for nearly two decades to delay and dilute climate policy, according to a new report by nonprofit shareholder activist organisation Just Share.

Published on Tuesday, 13 May 2025, The Obstruction Playbook: How corporate lobbying threatens South Africa’s Just Transition documents how powerful industry actors — including Sasol, Business Unity South Africa (Busa) and the Minerals Council South Africa — have worked persistently, in public and in private, to derail an effective climate policy response by the South African government.

A window into closed-door meetings

Over the past two decades, major polluters and industry associations have regularly met in private with the Treasury and other government officials to discuss climate legislation — engagements that are largely invisible to the public.

While companies made formal submissions during public consultations, much of the real influence happened behind closed doors, through bilateral meetings and direct communication with policymakers.

To uncover the extent of industry influence, Just Share spent two years gathering evidence from public records and documents obtained through Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) requests. These included Treasury budget papers, policy documents, draft legislation, and submissions to the Davis Tax Committee.

Just Share reported that accessing records of private meetings between government officials and major polluters was especially difficult — some responses to Paia requests taking months, and even then the information was often incomplete or vague.

“It’s not clear whether the government isn’t keeping proper records or is just reluctant to share them — we suspect it’s the former,” said Emma Schuster, Just Share’s senior climate risk analyst, during a webinar to launch the report on Tuesday.

“Especially when it comes to bilateral meetings between the government and high-emitting companies which remain entirely hidden unless specific Paia requests are made. Even then, we have no idea whether we’re getting the full picture.”

She noted that despite the length of their report, “what is striking is how much we can’t see — especially bilateral meetings between the government and high-emitting companies, which remain entirely hidden unless someone makes a specific request for that information.

“So, what we offer here is not by any means a comprehensive record of government/business interactions, but even so it demonstrates a clear pattern of influence,” said Schuster.

An unregulated landscape

Unlike in the US or EU, lobbying in South Africa is unregulated. There are no legal requirements for companies or government officials to disclose private meetings or written communications.

Read more: Lifting the veil on corporate climate lobbying

“For the most part, it’s not even acknowledged as something that happens,” said Schuster. “Interactions are framed as ‘engagements’ or, more concerningly, ‘partnerships’. And certainly not as the kind of lobbying we associate with the US or Europe.”

The report shows the government often gives in to industry pressure, but this report does not allege corruption — rather, it highlights how an under-resourced state, struggling to deliver on its mandates, often turns to business for support, inadvertently allowing vested interests to take the lead in shaping policy.

“The state’s record-keeping is abysmal,” said Schuster. “This opacity allows corporate influence to flourish unchecked.”

The key players

The report identifies Sasol — South Africa’s largest private emitter — alongside powerful industry associations Busa and Minerals Council SA, as central actors in a coordinated effort to stall climate action.

Industry associations play a critical role. “They allow individual companies to project public commitment to climate action, while the association lobbies on their behalf for weaker regulation,” explained Schuster. Because associations are not subject to customer or shareholder pressure, their lobbying is harder to scrutinise.

“It was particularly striking to us how the positions taken by Busa — which is meant to represent a broad set of corporate interests across multiple sectors — appear to be dominated by the interests of its high emitting members,” she said.

She noted that the report doesn’t cover Eskom due to its parastatal status, but acknowledged its significance.

Three core narratives dominate these lobbying efforts:

Positive contribution framing: “We’re essential to jobs and economic growth; don’t regulate us.”

Developing country framing: “SA’s emissions are small; others should take the lead.”

Pace and scale framing: “We support the transition — but not too fast or ambitiously.”

It should be noted that The Presidential Climate Commission’s own report, The State of Climate Action in South Africa (2024), challenges fossil fuel companies’ narrative that they are indispensable for jobs and economic growth by demonstrating that South Africa’s just energy transition (JET) will create significantly more jobs in renewable energy, green hydrogen, and electric vehicles than those lost in coal.

Far from harming the economy, the JET is projected to attract more than R1-trillion in investments, boost energy security, and drive sustainable economic growth, positioning South Africa competitively in the global green economy while addressing climate risks

Daily Maverick reached out to Sasol, Minerals Council SA and and Busa, who are the three main players, for comment in response to the report’s findings.

Minerals Council SA described itself as “the principal advocate for mining in South Africa in engagements with government on policy, taxes and other areas affecting mining”, and said it aimed to create “a conducive policy, legislative and operating environment that facilitates growth and investment to grow the mining industry for the benefit of the economy and all South Africans”.

The council noted that it participated in multi-stakeholder workshops and provided data and responses to industry challenges.

“Our members are supportive of climate action within the national context and are compliant with the relevant laws,” it said.

The council also highlighted that the mining sector was “leading South Africa’s energy transition, with about 16,000 MW of embedded renewable energy projects with an investment value of R275-billion”, citing Operation Vulindlela data. These investments, it said, were helping to reduce load shedding, lower operational costs, and support national and global decarbonisation goals.

Sasol said it had “noted the release of Just Share’s report, and we will study this further”.

Business Unity South Africa (Busa) had not responded by the time of publication.

The Carbon Tax Act — a case study in delay and dilution

First proposed in 2006, South Africa’s Carbon Tax was designed to apply the “polluter pays” principle by putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions to encourage reductions.

However, implementation was delayed for more than a decade. The tax only came into effect in June 2019 — and remains one of the weakest carbon pricing mechanisms globally.

Although the nominal tax rate has increased over time, generous tax-free allowances of up to 95% mean the effective rate is far below the global average. The Treasury has proposed maintaining many of these allowances until 2030 or 2031.

Currently, companies pay just R35.40 ($1.90) per ton of CO₂ for combustion emissions, and R11.80 ($0.63) for process emissions — far below the $75 to $100/tCO₂e recommended by the World Bank to meet climate targets.

Sasol, while publicly supporting carbon pricing, has consistently lobbied to retain these allowances. Paia documents show that in Treasury workshops, the company argued that “higher rates without allowances would harm productivity and job creation”, a claim the report calls “self-serving”.

A clear example of interference

In November 2024, The Treasury released a long-overdue discussion paper on Phase 2 of the carbon tax. The paper proposed key reforms: raising the tax rate by 2030, gradually reducing tax-free allowances, and applying higher rates for emissions above companies’ carbon budgets.

“The carbon tax has been delayed for so long, and these were all proposals that really should have been implemented five or more years ago,” explained executive director of Just Share, Tracey Davies

A stakeholder workshop followed in January 2025, attended by industry and civil society groups, where, Davies said,“the Treasury really seemed to be standing firm on this being finally the time to move forward”.

But by February, the national Budget review dropped most of the key proposals.

The proposals had been dropped, just completely disappeared — and it is really fair to say that we were gobsmacked. We could not understand how this could have happened.

So Just Share filed a Paia request to uncover what had changed. The Treasury responded with a list of private meetings it held with Sasol executives in the lead-up to the Budget — three meetings between December 2024 and January 2025, each involving five to seven senior Sasol representatives.

“We don’t get the minutes of those meetings — apparently, that is protected by taxpayer confidentiality, even though it’s massively in the public interest,” said Davies. “But the subject of those meetings was the carbon tax discussion paper.”

During the webinar’s public Q&A, David le Page, an attendee from Fossil Free South Africa, pointed out that, “some of the world's most democratic countries — Norway, Sweden and Finland — make tax returns public”.

Davies added that not long after the budget, both Sasol and Minerals Council SA publicly welcomed the decision to drop or dilute Phase 2 proposals. And then Sasol’s chief financial officer confirmed the Phase 2 proposals “would have had a significant impact on Sasol’s free cash flow” and welcomed the Treasury’s decision to withdraw them.

“So I think there are very logical conclusions to be drawn from that sequence of events,” said Davies.

Climate Change Act

The Climate Change Act, passed in 2024 after years of delays, faced similar corporate pushback.

The report illustrates how corporates successfully pushed to remove criminal penalties for companies that exceed their carbon budgets. Instead, the government proposed a higher carbon tax for over-emitters — an alternative that still requires new regulations and changes to the Carbon Tax Act, none of which have materialised.

Read more: Climate Change Bill heads for final stretch, but the hard slog of implementation lies ahead

Meanwhile, the key sections of the act — those governing corporate carbon budgets — remain dormant. Emitters have also lobbied to align these budgets with the already-weak Carbon Tax Act, effectively making limits more lenient and compliance voluntary.

Combating the imbalance

The report offers several recommendations to begin addressing the power imbalance:

Regulate lobbying: Introduce mandatory disclosure of meetings, submissions and communications between government and private sector actors.

Record and publish meetings: Keep accurate records of all engagements — and make them public by default.

Strengthen civil society input: Ensure meaningful representation from non-industry voices in all climate policy forums.

Reform consultation processes: Prioritise the interests of those most affected by the climate crisis, not just those most able to influence policy.

“This is about more than climate policy — it’s about democracy, accountability, and justice,” said Schuster. “And unless there is action taken to rebalance power in policy making, we risk locking ourselves and future generations into a more dangerous and a less fair world.” DM

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