What SA’s draft fuel stockpile policy reveals about the state that wrote it
Daily Maverick | 17.07.2026 06:24
On 9 July, the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources gazetted its draft Strategic Petroleum Stocks Policy for public comment. It is the first serious attempt to rebuild South Africa’s fuel reserves since the apartheid government carved crude oil caverns into the rock at Saldanha Bay in the 1970s. After thoroughly analysing the document, what I found was a policy with the right diagnosis, a workable architecture, and a text riddled with internal contradictions.
