South Africa’s fossil fuel industry is using sport to clean up its image

28 Nov 2024

Riding high on national pride in our champion rugby team, Engen’s sponsorship of the Springboks celebrates South Africa’s favourite rugby players becoming part of the ‘Engen family’, a stark example of how sportswashing can distract people from the grim reality that fossil fuels are creating. ‘Clean money’ for sport is in much shorter supply, but is helping these dirty companies trash the planet and our future worth the short-term income?

In a fresh collaboration with Badvertising – which has a mission to “stop adverts fuelling the climate emergency” – Politically Aweh, South Africa’s cheekiest satirical news show, exposes the mechanics of sportswashing like never seen – or heard – before.

https://youtu.be/V8ZJEjyQP-8

Anchor host KG Mokgadi valiantly attempts to speak GenZee-lese, aided and abetted by comedy legend and long-time Politically Aweh staff writer, Angel Campey, in a side-splitting parody of online product review videos. This time the products are South Africa’s favourite sportswashing “soap brands”. “We’re looking at which sportswashing products are the best at making oil stains and other dirty business… simply vanish!”

The products in question?

“Don’t Skip Ad” washing powder from Astron Energy, “Oh No” liquid detergent from Sasol, “Total Vanish” spray from TotalEnergies, and “Sunlite Reputation Laundering Bar Soap” from Engen.

“For fossil fuel companies whose pollution threatens the future of sport, using sponsorship to ‘sportswash’ their reputations is like tobacco companies sponsoring cancer clinics — these deals that pretend to be friendly are really smokescreens allowing harm to continue.

Politically Aweh vividly exposes these underhand corporate tactics.

With air pollution from fossil fuels alone killing between five and eight million people a year, it’s time to kick major polluters out of sports such as football and rugby and stop them from exploiting games to launder their reputations,” says Andrew Simms of the Badvertising campaign.

Athletics was on the agenda at this year’s climate action jamboree COP29, though some might say “COP out” 29. A two-hour panel session held on 18 November 2024 entitled Sports for Climate Action: Playing to Win Against Climate Change, brought together ministers, athletes and sustainability practitioners from around the world to “discuss actions and strategies to help sport address the climate crisis.”

Discussions ranged from the impact of sporting events themselves on the climate through, for example, transport, as well as the impact climate change is having on athletes and the locations in which sport is played.

As climate change is having such a profound impact on the lives of sportspeople, fans and industry-related professionals, it would seem like a no-brainer not to hasten the process by actively assisting fossil fuel companies burn through planetary limits.

Unfortunately, the smell of money has created a serious disconnect. Women’s sport especially struggles for funding, so are an ideal target for companies wishing to wash the impact of their activities. With few other options, many “take the deal” – such as Banyana Banyana with Sasol.

“While Sasol’s emissions drive up global temperatures, affecting women’s health especially, their new corporate social responsibility product called Always Lying To You Ultra, for extra heavy periods of bad news like this, is really effective.”

When it came to Fifa’s major sponsorship deal with Saudi Aramco announced in April this year, this was a step too far for more than 130 professional women players from 26 countries, with more than 2,700 caps between them, who made a statement titled “Aramco sponsorship is a middle finger to women’s football”.

Calling for an end to this deal, they said: “Aramco is the world’s largest state-owned oil and gas company, playing a major role in fuelling the climate crisis. The oil giant is also 98.5% owned by Saudi Arabia, who have a track record of human rights violations against women and other minorities, including the LGBTQIA+ community… As the largest state-owned oil and gas company in the world, Saudi Aramco is one of the corporations which is most responsible for burning football’s future. Grassroots football across the world is being smashed by extreme heat, drought, fires and floods but, as we all pay the consequences, Saudi Arabia rakes in its profits, with Fifa as its cheerleader.”

When you put it like that the choice seems simple.

We need Siya Kolisi and his champion teammates to break up with Big Oil (in their case, Engen) and protect the future of all the kids who look up to them. But as Politically Aweh explored in a previous episode with retired Australian Diamonds netball player, Amy Steel, it can be very challenging for athletes to speak out against sponsors.

That’s what makes the letter to Fifa striking – and possibly a turning point in the conversation on fossil fuel sponsorships and sport.

Ayisat Yusuf, a retired Nigerian pro footballer who has played in three Fifa Women’s World Cups, was one of the signatories to the letter. She sent Politically Aweh a video message: “I signed the letter to Fifa about the Aramco sponsorship because fossil fuel sportswashing has no place in our sport,” she said.

Her message is particularly powerful when considering the athlete hails from a country that has been devastated by oil company pollution in the Niger Delta. Yusuf appears to be one of only a handful of African athletes who have so far felt able to directly challenge fossil fuel sponsorships of sport.

Further abroad, earlier this year British Olympic Gold Medallist Etienne Stott MBE told Politically Aweh viewers: “Fossil fuel lobbyists [are] cynically exploiting the power and beauty of sport and it has to stop. Anyone who cares about sport — its fans and its participants — and in fact life itself, should be calling out greenwash. We need to kick out fossil money from sport, and it needs to happen today.”

With this movement gaining momentum around the world, it remains to be seen which professional South African athlete or sports federation will be the first to take a public stance against fossil fuel sponsorships in sport. DM

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The products in question?