Comedians roast Sasol in satirical corporate video ‘remake’ ahead of company AGM

https://youtu.be/8moeAWYYcQU?si=LEWXlKUlqxuSkBHI

Sasol is holding its 45th Annual General Meeting on Friday, 15 November 2024. With billions of rands of pension funds and other investors’ money at stake, shareholders have long been bamboozled about the looming environmental and economic iceberg faced by the company responsible for the world’s largest single-point greenhouse gas emissions and the second biggest driver of hospital admissions in Mpumalanga.

Luckily, Safta award-winning comic Siv Ngesi was on hand to help the team at Politically Aweh with some truthful corporate communication, while hilarious anchor host KG Mokgadi drops the facts that investors and everyone else should know about South Africa’s home-grown fossil fuel firm that thinks it is “too big to fail” and won’t see the writing on the wall.

“We know Sasol has lost three-quarters of its value since 2022 and is facing a bit of a cash crunch, so we kindly updated its corporate video free of charge!”

Along with their good friends in the South African government, particularly the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, (which Siv hilariously parodied in another Safta-winning video with Politically Aweh in 2021), Sasol loves to remind us, “glug glug” is integrated into the fabric of our lives and economy. 

They employ hundreds of thousands of people, they pay taxes and create many of the goods and services that South Africans use on a daily basis. If they go down, we’ll all go down, is the not-so-subtle message. 

“A lot of regular people’s savings are invested in the company, and a third of all the petrol we use to get around comes from Sasol,” notes KG. 

According to their website, which prominently features the women’s football teams they sponsor, Sasol is a global chemicals and energy company which “harnesses our knowledge and expertise to integrate sophisticated technologies and processes into world-scale operating facilities. We safely and sustainably source, produce and market a range of high-quality products, creating value for stakeholders.”

Lots of nice words for “nothing to see here”.

The truth is that the negative impact of Sasol’s activities on the environment and people is astronomical: Sasol is the largest private emitter of greenhouse gases in South Africa (after Eskom), and its Secunda facility is the largest single-point source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

As the parody corporate video frontman aka Siv Ngesi reminds viewers, their biggest, dirtiest secret is that they appear to have no plan for the energy transition other than to keep obfuscating and hope for the best.

He and his “Sasol colleagues” boast about blowing through emission targets as if they aren’t there (which for them, they aren’t), and laugh about the whistle-blower who is in hiding after revealing the true extent of their polluting ways. “He was always worrying about silly things like rivers. Cry me a river bro!” 

Sasol’s “safe and sustainable” process of taking dirty coal and converting it into fuel, plastics and other products was invented by Nazi Germany and leaves a toxic sacrifice zone all along the “value chain” in which people and the environment are left to absorb the chemical mess.

This “social cost of carbon” damage to society has been estimated at R224-billion rand every single year, on the lower end. And guess who’s picking up the tab? 

Hint: it’s not Sasol and rhymes with bus. 

“Sasol-Secunda was a massive state intervention that distorted the economy. Taxpayers subsidised the company enormously then and we continue to do so today even though it’s a private listed company,” according to Tracey Davies of shareholder advocacy NGO, Just Share.

In an interview with Politically Aweh, she adds that despite Sasol’s annual carbon emissions being bigger than those of many small countries, its enormous influence over government policy in relation to climate change, air pollution and the carbon tax means it can effectively ignore it: “This is something that’s fairly poorly understood in South Africa because there’s no transparency around this interaction.”

Looking around the world at extreme weather events, droughts and other impacts of greenhouse gas-driven climate change, it seems a no-brainer that one of the world’s largest emitters should be more concerned. 

Instead of avoiding the climate issue by holding its AGM online, soothing shareholders with greenwashing spin and taking climate and lobbying disclosure resolutions off the agenda, perhaps the wiser course would be to face the music. And by music, we don’t mean violins on the Titanic. 

Or do we? Glug-glug! DM

Read Just Share’s recent briefing on Sasol Limited’s 2024 climate-related disclosures here.

Politically Aweh’s upcoming podcast interview with Tracey Davies, Executive Director of Just Share, will be published on its channels on Thursday, 14 November. For more from Politically Aweh, visit our website.