I took to the stage at the Green Hydrogen Summit in a denim two-piece and a butter-yellow graphic T-shirt. It was not the formal wear that summits of this nature typically call for, and that was precisely the point. I had been invited to speak at a Presidential Climate Commission side event about the importance of environmental and social safeguards, and I wanted what I wore to say something before I did.
The T-shirt told a story that was considerably older than the hydrogen economy. Its design came from the South African History Archive, circa 1989. The Chemical Workers Industrial Union had produced it at the height of apartheid. It read, boldly: “Disinvest on our terms”.
In 1989, chemical workers were organising for progressive working conditions for men and women alike, while participating in the international calls for boycotts, sanctions and divestment. But their position carried an important distinction. Workers were not simply cheering companies out of the country. They were insisting that if capital was going to leave, it would not leave on its own terms, abandoning the people whose labour had built its profits.
That insistence was grounded in bitter experience. When multinational companies announced their withdrawal from South Africa in the 1980s, several did not really leave. They sold local operations to management, retained licensing, technology and supply agreements, and continued to profit while claiming the moral credit of having disinvested. Workers were often neither consulted nor compensated.
The unions had a name for this: corporate camouflage.
I was struck by that phrase. What we now call greenwashing was already part of the activist vocabulary more than three decades ago. The practice of dressing up business as usual in the language of moral progress, of being seen to change while changing very little, was named, understood and resisted by workers who had everything to lose.
Just transition
This history matters because we are contemplating another great restructuring of our economy. Too often, the just transition is discussed as though it concerns mineworkers alone. It does not. The shift away from fossil fuels will reshape the motor industry, steel and chemicals: precisely the industries whose workers understood in 1989 what happens when capital moves and people are left behind.
Green hydrogen is increasingly being positioned as the bridge that will carry these industries into a low-carbon future. It may yet become that. But we should be honest about where we are.
South Africa’s September 2026 Africa Green Hydrogen Summit saw the unveiling of six priority green hydrogen and Power-to-X projects, alongside the launch of the country’s inaugural Green Hydrogen Deal Book. These developments build on significant public and international financing commitments intended to establish a domestic hydrogen economy.
The ambition is considerable. The question is whether the economic fundamentals, infrastructure and markets are developing at the same pace as the investment narrative.
Green hydrogen remains expensive to produce relative to conventional fossil-fuel-based hydrogen. Its commercial viability depends on access to affordable renewable electricity, water, transport infrastructure, storage and, crucially, buyers willing to pay for the resulting products. The development of these markets cannot simply be assumed.
There is also a less comfortable question: how much of the hydrogen economy being proposed is genuinely green?
Some proposed projects and associated industrial strategies depend, directly or indirectly, on liquefied natural gas (LNG). This matters because methane emissions across the gas supply chain can substantially undermine the climate benefits claimed for gas. Over a 20-year period, methane has a global warming potential approximately 80 times that of carbon dioxide. A hydrogen project that relies on fossil gas while wearing a green label risks reproducing the very fossil-fuel dependency it claims to replace.
A project that relies on fossil gas while wearing a green label is not a transition – it is corporate camouflage in a new industrial language.
The gas cliff we are planning around
South Africa’s gas ambitions deserve particular scrutiny.
The original Draft Gas Master Plan was built around two important assumptions: that we would develop indigenous gas resources and that we would cultivate sufficient domestic demand to sustain a local gas industry. Neither assumption has yet materialised at the scale required to underpin the ambitions being advanced.
The country’s existing supply from Mozambique’s Pande and Temane fields is also declining. The anticipated loss of this supply by 2028 has become known as the gas cliff, with implications for industrial users and the country’s energy security.
Yet our energy planning continues to assign gas a substantial role. The 2025 Integrated Resource Plan envisages 6,000MW of new gas-to-power capacity by 2030, rising to 16,000MW by 2039. These ambitions require significant infrastructure, reliable supply arrangements and a market capable of absorbing the costs.
We seem to be marching like lemmings towards a gas cliff, committing ourselves to infrastructure and long-term investments before adequately demonstrating that the underlying resource and demand assumptions can hold.
The revised Gas Master Plan has still not been finalised. In April, Business Leadership South Africa’s reform tracker reported that it had been further delayed after Nedlac consultations did not conclude as planned.
This raises a fundamental question: why are we so comfortable making long-term investment and infrastructure decisions around an industry whose supply arrangements, domestic resource base and future demand remain uncertain?
The consequences are not abstract. Gas infrastructure is capital-intensive and built to operate over decades. If projected demand fails to materialise, or imported gas becomes unaffordable, South Africans could be left with stranded assets and the costs of a transition that never delivered the promised economic returns.
Who is shaping the energy transition?
These questions cannot be separated from the politics of policymaking and the influence of corporate interests.
I recently watched an insightful conversation about the work Just Share has done to expose the lobbying playbook employed by the carbon majors. It is a body of work that deserves much greater public attention, particularly as South Africa makes decisions about its long-term energy future.
The question I would put to Parliament is this: will it support the proposed Lobbying Transparency Bill announced by ActionSA’s parliamentary chief whip, Lerato Ngobeni, in July?
The proposed Private Member’s Bill seeks to establish a statutory framework for professional lobbying, including a public register requiring paid lobbyists to disclose whom they represent and which government institutions they seek to influence.
This is an important conversation, but it should extend beyond the narrow question of whether lobbying is legitimate. Lobbying is a recognised feature of democratic policymaking. Businesses, trade unions, civil society organisations and community formations all have a legitimate interest in influencing public policy.
The question is whether they have equitable access to decision-makers, whether their interests are transparent and whether the evidence they present can withstand public scrutiny.
When a fossil-fuel company advocates for gas as a transition fuel, for example, we should be able to establish who is making that argument, what commercial interests they represent, what evidence informs their position and whether competing evidence has been considered.
The same scrutiny should apply to the hydrogen economy. Who stands to benefit from the infrastructure being proposed? Who is financing these projects? Who are the intended offtakers? What happens if the anticipated international demand does not materialise?
These are not peripheral questions. They are questions about the political economy of the transition itself.
Whose pensions are financing these ambitions?
There is another dimension to this conversation that deserves far greater attention: public finance.
South Africa’s public pension savings are managed through institutions such as the Public Investment Corporation, which invests on behalf of the Government Employees Pension Fund and other public-sector clients. The PIC reported assets under management of R3.657-trillion as at 31 March 2026.
These are the retirement savings of teachers, nurses, police officers and other public servants. Their capital plays an important role in South Africa’s development, including through investments in infrastructure and strategic industries.
But development finance cannot become a blank cheque for industrial ambitions.
We need much greater scrutiny of the extent to which public pension capital is exposed to gas-related infrastructure, fossil-fuel-dependent industrial projects and investments whose financial viability depends on the assumptions underpinning our gas ambitions.
The question is not whether public funds should invest in industrial development. They can and should contribute to a more equitable economy. It is whether those investments are being made on the basis of credible demand forecasts, sound risk assessments and demonstrable long-term returns, with adequate protections for beneficiaries.
If the gas market fails to materialise as anticipated, who carries the financial risk? If hydrogen projects cannot secure viable offtake agreements, who absorbs the losses? And what social protections exist for workers and communities whose livelihoods are tied to these industries?
We cannot talk about a just transition while treating the financial risks as someone else's problem.
A transition that leaves no one behind
There is also an opportunity we are not giving sufficient attention: regional integration.
At the August 2026 SADC Summit in Durban, regional leaders reiterated the importance of strengthening intra-African trade and industrial cooperation. Yet intra-SADC trade remains approximately a fifth of the region’s total trade. South Africa’s hydrogen ambitions should therefore be considered in the context of building regional industrial capacity, rather than simply positioning the country as an exporter of green commodities to European and other international markets.
We need to ask whether our hydrogen strategy will create regional manufacturing capacity, strengthen local supply chains and support industrial development across the continent, or reproduce an extractive economic model in which we export raw materials and absorb the environmental and social costs.
The legal and political contestation around fossil-fuel exploration also offers important lessons. In August 2026, the Constitutional Court’s ruling in the Shell and Impact Africa Wild Coast exploration matter reinforced the importance of environmental rights and meaningful community participation in decisions affecting people’s livelihoods and relationships with land and sea.
As someone who participated in the Sustaining the Wild Coast campaign during my time at Greenpeace Africa, I do not regard this as an abstract legal principle. Communities are not obstacles to be managed in the pursuit of industrial development. Their rights, knowledge, livelihoods and consent must be central to how we define development.
The chemical workers of 1989 understood something that our current transition discourse sometimes forgets: workers and communities cannot be expected to absorb the costs of economic restructuring while others collect the returns.
Their demand was not that capital should never leave, or that industries should never change. It was that change must be accountable to the people it affects.
That is the standard we should apply to green hydrogen, gas and every other proposed pathway in South Africa's energy transition.
Where projects demonstrate credible decarbonisation, meaningful community participation, fair benefit-sharing and genuine protections for workers, they deserve consideration and support. But where green is merely a label, where commercial assumptions are treated as certainties and communities are expected to absorb the risks while investors collect the returns, we should not be shy about questioning the investments.
And where the evidence does not support the ambition, we should be prepared to withdraw.
Disinvestment cannot simply mean moving capital from one industry to another and declaring the transition complete. It must mean changing the terms on which capital operates, who benefits from it and who has the power to shape the economy that emerges.
The chemical workers of 1989 gave us the language for this. We should take their demand seriously.
Disinvest on our terms. DM
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