For Niall Kramer, spokesperson for the Offshore Petroleum Association of South Africa, the numbers tell a story of frustration. In some African jurisdictions, he told Business Day, approvals for offshore exploration take three to nine months. In South Africa, the same process can stretch to five years. Successive appeals and court proceedings, he said, have delayed projects and drained investor interest, contributing to a halt in offshore exploration despite discoveries made over the past decade.
That frustration found an unlikely echo in Cape Town on Thursday, when finance minister Enoch Godongwana weighed in on the institutional obstacles holding back South Africa’s economic growth. Speaking to RMB chief economist Isaah Mhlanga at a breakfast event following the medium-term budget policy statement, Godongwana pointed to the country’s gas exploration experience as a cautionary tale of how legal challenges can deter investment.
“Companies that found gas in Namibia started their exploration efforts here but faced repeated legal challenges over environmental issues and eventually gave up,” Godongwana said. “They went to Namibia, where they made discoveries.”
The minister did not stop at litigation. “Even the constitutional architecture is a problem,” he said, naming the country’s regulatory framework and constitutional structure among the barriers to investment, alongside capacity constraints and corruption.
Mhlanga had set the stage with a pointed comparison. He cited Rwanda’s deal to host Formula One from 2030 and asked why South Africa, despite bidding earlier, struggled to get major projects over the line. His question went to the heart of a concern that has shadowed the economy for years: why institutional delays and poor co-ordination across government continue to hold back infrastructure development.
For the people and companies working in South Africa’s oil and gas sector, the minister’s remarks gave voice to longstanding worries. In July, Opasa said lengthy approval processes and legal proceedings had contributed to the halt in offshore exploration. The association has called for specialised courts to speed up the resolution of disputes involving offshore exploration. Godongwana revealed that Treasury director-general Duncan Pieterse had raised with the justice department the possibility of establishing environmental courts to accelerate cases, though he stopped short of announcing any decision to create them.
Litigation is not the whole story, however. In July 2024, TotalEnergies announced its withdrawal from offshore Block 11B/12B off South Africa’s southern coast, where it had discovered natural gas and associated liquid hydrocarbons at the Brulpadda and Luiperd wells in 2019 and 2020 respectively. The company said the discoveries could not be developed commercially, citing the economic challenges of producing and marketing the gas for the South African market. Its exit followed the withdrawal of project partner CNR International.
The pattern of companies leaving South African waters only to succeed elsewhere has been noted at the highest levels of government. Mineral and petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe said last year that litigation had affected exploration activity in the country. He cited Shell, which abandoned a seismic survey locally before making oil and gas discoveries in Namibia, and Italian oil major Eni, which he said had faced repeated court challenges before making major oil discoveries in Côte d’Ivoire.
Behind the policy debate sits a looming deadline that will touch households and industry alike. The lack of progress in developing domestic gas resources has heightened concern over future supplies as South Africa approaches what analysts call the “gas cliff”: the expected end of pipeline gas supplies from Mozambique’s Pande and Temane fields by mid-2028. Those fields supply a significant share of the country’s natural gas needs.
The warning signs have already reached Parliament. At a parliamentary committee meeting in June last year, industry representatives cautioned that fragmented policy and regulatory uncertainty were delaying decisions on how to address the expected supply shortfall.
For now, the question Kramer and others in the industry keep asking remains unanswered: whether the environmental courts floated by the Treasury will materialise, and whether the companies that once explored South African waters, and found their fortunes in Namibia and Côte d’Ivoire instead, might ever return. As reported by Business Day, whose full coverage is available at https://www.businessday.co.za/news/2026-10-24-godongwana-flags-regulatory-hurdles-to-sa-gas-exploration/, the minister’s candid assessment suggests the hurdles are now recognised at the highest levels, even if the solutions are not yet in place.