South Africa’s public institutions are meant to serve the public interest, protect constitutional rights and act as guardians of the common good. Yet in the country’s approach to oil and gas, one institution stands out for embodying a profound contradiction: the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (Pasa).
Pasa occupies a dual role that would raise alarm bells in any democratic system. It is tasked with promoting and facilitating oil and gas exploration and production, while simultaneously acting as a gatekeeper for licences and permits.
In effect, the same entity that markets South Africa as “open for exploration” also evaluates whether companies should be allowed to drill, conduct seismic surveys or extract hydrocarbons. This arrangement is now further entrenched by the Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act 23 of 2024 (UPRDA), which formalises Pasa as the primary regulatory authority while maintaining its promotional mandate.
This is not a technical quirk of governance. It is a structural conflict of interest with far-reaching consequences for communities, ecosystems and SA’s climate commitments.
In practice, Pasa functions less like an independent regulator and more like an investment promotion agency for the fossil fuel industry. Its 2025/2026 strategic positioning continues to emphasise “accelerated exploration” and state-carried interests, often at the expense of environmental precaution.
Environmental risk, social disruption and climate impacts are routinely framed as manageable side issues, rather than central concerns. When an institution is mandated to attract industry while also policing it, the outcome is predictable: promotion consistently outweighs precaution.
Legal setbacks
This tension has been most visibly exposed along SA’s Wild Coast. For years, coastal communities have resisted offshore seismic surveys and prospective drilling, arguing that consultation processes were inadequate and that customary rights to land and livelihoods were ignored. In multiple cases, courts have sided with communities, affirming that meaningful consultation is not a box-ticking exercise but a constitutional requirement.
The legal battle, culminating in landmark Constitutional Court proceedings in late 2025, has seen the apex court grapple with whether “legal engineering” by companies can ever cure a fundamentally flawed initial consultation.These rulings did more than halt specific projects; they revealed systemic weaknesses in how extractive governance is conducted, and the role of Pasa within it.
Rather than prompting institutional introspection, these legal setbacks appear to have been treated as obstacles to be managed. The broader model has remained intact: exploration is presented as inevitable, resistance as an inconvenience, and communities as stakeholders to be persuaded rather than rights-holders to be respected. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Eastern Cape, where the KwaMaqoma community offers a sobering case study.
In 2025, an information session on prospective oil and gas activity was jointly convened in KwaMaqoma by the Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality and Pasa, as reported by community representatives and civil society observers. Such sessions are often presented as evidence of public participation and transparency. Yet members of the Maqoma Royal House, a central institution of customary authority and land stewardship, were excluded from the engagement.
This exclusion was not merely procedural. It undermined the legitimacy of the process itself, sidelining those with recognised authority over land and community affairs. It bypasses the principles of the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act (IPILRA) and renders consultation performative. It illustrates a pattern in which local government and the Petroleum Agency of SA converge to clear a path for extraction, prioritising investor confidence over democratic participation.
The KwaMaqoma episode illustrates a broader pattern of institutional alignment between the petroleum regulator and other arms of the state. Local government, national agencies and industry interests converge around a shared objective: clearing the path for extraction.
Speed prioritised over democratic participation
The result is a form of coordinated facilitation that prioritises speed and investor confidence over democratic participation. Under this model, consultation becomes performative, and development is invoked as a justification rather than examined as a claim.
This matters because oil and gas extraction is not a neutral development choice. It carries long-term environmental risks, locks in carbon-intensive infrastructure and directly contradicts SA’s stated commitment to a just transition.
As the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted in its landmark Roadmap, there is no room for new fossil fuel supply in a world aiming to limit warming to 1.5°C. Communities are asked to bear the social and ecological costs while the promised benefits – jobs, local development and energy security – remain speculative and unevenly distributed.
When dissenting voices are marginalised, the imbalance of risk and reward becomes even starker. The Constitution of South Africa guarantees the right to an environment that is not harmful to health or wellbeing, and obliges the state to protect the environment for present and future generations.
Globally, best practice in extractive governance recognises the need for institutional separation. Promotion and regulation are distinct functions precisely because combining them undermines credibility and accountability. Environmental regulators are expected to act independently of commercial interests, and licensing decisions should be insulated from political and economic pressure. SA’s petroleum governance architecture does the opposite, embedding promotional bias into the heart of decision making.
The consequences extend beyond individual projects. By entrenching fossil fuel expansion, Pasa’s current mandate places SA on a collision course with its climate obligations and its own Bill of Rights. The country is already experiencing the impacts of climate breakdown, from droughts and floods to rising food insecurity. Continuing to open new frontiers for oil and gas extraction under the banner of development ignores both scientific consensus and lived reality.
Institutional reform
If SA is serious about climate justice, institutional reform is unavoidable. At the minimum, the promotional and regulatory functions housed within Pasa must be separated. Licensing decisions should be overseen by an independent body with a clear mandate to prioritise environmental protection, human rights and climate alignment. Consultation processes must recognise customary authority and community governance structures as central, not optional. And development claims attached to fossil fuel projects must be subjected to rigorous, evidence-based scrutiny.
The alternative is to persist with a system in which the referee officiates for one team, and communities are left to fight uphill battles in courts and on the ground. The experiences of the Wild Coast and KwaMaqoma should serve as warnings, not footnotes. They expose a governance model that privileges extraction over justice, expediency over participation, and short-term gain over long-term survival.
SA has a choice. It can continue laying out a red carpet for an industry whose business model is incompatible with a safe climate, or it can reimagine its institutions to serve people, the planet and future generations. Ending the conflict of interest at the heart of petroleum governance would be a meaningful place to start. DM
Noxolo Mfocwa is a strategist for social change and the Fossil Ad Ban advocacy campaigner at Fossil Free South Africa. From student activism to leading international human rights initiatives, her work has always been about holding power to account. She currently focuses on fossil fuel accountability and greenwashing, advocating for a South African energy future where public participation is transparent and human rights are non-negotiable.
