Why SA’s energy security is a feminist and economic emergency

As headlines track escalating tensions between the US, Israel and Iran and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, the instinct in South African boardrooms is to translate crisis into numbers. Brent crude pushes past $100 a barrel. The rand weakens. Risk is priced in.

But for most South Africans, this is not a story about markets. It is a story about survival.

The consequences of distant conflict are about to land in the most ordinary places: the taxi fare, the grocery bill, the paraffin stove. This week, the Central Energy Fund warned of a “perfect storm”; on 1 April a petrol price increase of more than R4.20 per litre and a staggering R7.15 per litre for diesel.

These are not marginal adjustments. They are systemic shocks that will ripple through transport costs, food prices and household budgets that are already under strain. What appears, at first glance, to be geopolitical instability is, in practice, a direct transfer of cost to South African households.

The feedback loop of volatility

South Africa’s energy crisis is not only about supply constraints or ageing infrastructure. It is about exposure. The link between a global oil shock and a local electricity bill is unusually tight. Despite Eskom’s recent operational gains, including an extended period without load shedding, the underlying cost of keeping the grid stable remains deeply tied to fossil fuels.

Diesel sits at the centre of this contradiction. When international oil prices rise, the cost of back-up generation, reserve capacity and system balancing rises with them. Reliability, in other words, becomes more expensive precisely when the broader economy is under pressure. The result is a feedback loop: global volatility is absorbed and reproduced within the domestic energy system.

The National Energy Regulator of South Africa has now confirmed electricity tariff increases of 8.76% for direct Eskom customers from 1 April, with municipal users facing a 9.01% hike in July. These increases are not simply the result of local inefficiencies or operational costs. They reflect a deeper structural reality, an energy system still exposed to international fuel markets and geopolitical shocks.

South Africa is, in effect, importing instability and passing the cost on to its citizens, charging households more for the basic promise of keeping the lights on.

The gendered burden of energy poverty

While the shocks are global, their effects are intensely local and deeply gendered. In South Africa, where women head nearly 42% of households, they are not only income earners but the primary managers of energy and food budgets. When paraffin prices are projected to rise by more than RS8 per litre in a single month, the result is not simply financial strain. It is a cascade of impossible decisions.

Does a household absorb higher transport costs to keep an income stream intact or cut back on food? Does it remain on the grid as tariffs rise or shift to cheaper, more dangerous fuels? These are not hypothetical questions. They are daily calculations, made under pressure, and disproportionately by women.

The consequences extend beyond the immediate. In energy-poor households, girls already lose significant time each week to the work of managing fuel, collecting it, stretching it and substituting it when it runs out. As prices rise, that burden intensifies. Time is diverted away from education and opportunity, reinforcing cycles of inequality that energy policy rarely accounts for.

There are also health implications that remain largely invisible in economic debates. Greater reliance on paraffin and other unsafe fuels increases exposure to indoor air pollution, burns and household fires, risks that are absorbed privately but ultimately borne by the public health system. Energy poverty, in this context, is not only about access. It is about risk, time and the unequal distribution of both.

Renewable energy as a sovereignty strategy

The case for renewable energy in South Africa has long been framed in environmental terms. That framing is no longer sufficient. What the current crisis has made clear is that energy dependence is, at its core, a question of sovereignty.

An energy system reliant on imported fuel, much of it moving through chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, is structurally exposed. Supply disruptions, price shocks and geopolitical conflict are not external risks; they are embedded features of the system, passed directly on to consumers. In this context, renewable energy is not simply a cleaner alternative. It is a form of economic insulation.

Wind, solar and battery storage offer something fossil fuels cannot: predictability. Their inputs are local, abundant and beyond the reach of international conflict, blockades or cartel pricing. This shifts energy from a traded commodity, vulnerable to external shocks, to a domestic asset.

Accelerating the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET IP) remains critical, but the composition of that transition matters. Prioritising renewable generation, storage and grid expansion becomes far more urgent than committing to new imported gas infrastructure. In this context, the continued framing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a “transition fuel” is increasingly difficult to sustain. LNG is globally traded, subject to price shocks, and is exposed to the same geopolitical risks that afflict oil. Replacing one imported fossil dependency with another does little to reduce household vulnerability, it simply shifts the source of the risk.

By pivoting to wind, solar and battery storage, South Africa can reduce its dependency on imported fossil fuels, effectively insulating households and industries from the price shocks and supply disruptions inherent in global markets. The objective is not only decarbonisation, but decoupling: breaking the link between distant conflicts and the cost of daily life in South African households.

At stake is more than energy supply. It is the ability to determine, domestically, the price and stability of a basic necessity, and to shield households and businesses from shocks they did not create and cannot control.

The cost of waiting

Delay has a cost, and it is immediate. Every year South Africa remains dependent on fossil fuels is another year in which distant conflicts, global price shocks and geopolitical instability dictate the cost of bread, transport and electricity. Recent budget allocations for grid expansion and the National Transmission Company are steps in the right direction, but the pace of change still lags behind the scale of the risk.

The April fuel and electricity hikes are not anomalies. They are a warning: vulnerability has a price, and households pay it first. A just energy transition cannot be measured only in megawatts or emissions. Its success is measured at the kitchen table, in whether families can absorb shocks without sacrificing safety, nutrition or opportunity.

The question is no longer whether South Africa can afford to accelerate the transition, it is whether it can afford not to. DM

Noxolo Mfocwa is a strategist and activist for social change, and the Fossil Ad Ban advocacy campaigner at Fossil Free South Africa. She holds a Bachelor of Social Science in Sociology, Politics and International Studies from Rhodes University.