Aluwani Museisi, country chair for Shell South Africa, has put the burden of South Africa’s offshore oil and gas future squarely on the state. Writing in Business Day (https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-10-12-aluwani-museisi-a-just-energy-transition-cant-be-built-on-unemployment/), he argues that government must build a predictable, science-based and time-bound regulatory system, one that allows responsible exploration to proceed, allows legitimate objections to be heard, and allows decisions to be made. His argument lands as energy leaders gather in Cape Town for Africa Energy Week, where the question of regulatory design and government accountability should frame the debate.
The stakes are institutional, not rhetorical. Can a country with mass unemployment, weak growth, fragile industrial capacity and persistent energy insecurity afford to treat oil and gas purely as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be shaped? Museisi’s answer is no. The current debate, he contends, is often reduced to a false choice between protecting the environment and developing the economy, between renewables and hydrocarbons, between climate action and employment. That framing makes for good slogans but poor economics. Countries do not industrialise on slogans; they industrialise on infrastructure, capital, technology, domestic supply chains and dependable energy systems. With official unemployment above 30%, it is not enough for policymakers to say what they are against. They must say what they are prepared to build, permit, finance and operate responsibly.
The institutional comparison he draws is with mining. That sector became a pillar of the South African economy because the country deliberately built institutions, infrastructure, financing models, skills pipelines and regulatory systems around it. Offshore oil and gas, if developed responsibly, could similarly support industrial renewal, particularly in coastal economies that urgently need investment and employment. Exploration, appraisal, development and production can mobilise investment across engineering, marine logistics, ports, fabrication, environmental services, legal services, data processing, transport and skills development. These translate into contracts for local firms, wages for workers, tax receipts for the state and demand for industrial capabilities the country already possesses.
Accountability, in Museisi’s framing, runs in both directions. Responsible development does not mean development at any cost. It requires rigorous environmental assessment, meaningful stakeholder engagement, respect for communities, credible emergency preparedness, transparent regulation and operators held to high standards. South Africans are entitled to demand these safeguards; industry must meet them and the government must enforce them. But safeguards should not become a synonym for paralysis. Investors can manage risk, he writes, but they cannot manage endless ambiguity, and it is the state’s responsibility to replace that ambiguity with regulatory certainty.
The equity dimension of the transition carries its own governance question. Treating any new oil and gas activity as incompatible with the energy transition, Museisi argues, often asks developing countries to carry a burden that wealthier economies did not carry during their own industrialisation. Africa did not create the climate crisis, yet it is too often told to leave resources undeveloped while importing the very fuels it is discouraged from producing. That, he says, is not a just transition but dependency dressed up as virtue. A credible transition must do three things at once: reduce emissions over time, strengthen energy security now, and grow the economy in ways that create work at scale.
Gas, in this framing, can support that balance. It can complement renewables with flexible generation when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, support industrial users that need reliable heat and power, reduce exposure to imported fuels and create the basis for new domestic value chains. The choice, as he presents it, is not between oil and gas forever or renewables tomorrow, but between a managed, investment-led transition that recognises South Africa’s starting point and a disorderly one that weakens the very economy expected to pay for decarbonisation.
Meanwhile, the regional context sharpens the point. Namibia is moving with urgency to understand and develop its offshore potential, while Mozambique has positioned gas as a major pillar of its long-term economic strategy. South Africa should not copy any country blindly, Museisi writes, but it should learn from those that move decisively and build capability around opportunity. Saying no to exploration does not reduce the country’s demand for energy; it shifts supply, jobs, tax revenues and industrial activity elsewhere, leaving consumers and businesses more exposed to import dependence, currency volatility and global shocks.
He is careful to note that economic potential must be proven, not assumed, and that not every exploration programme becomes a commercial discovery. That is precisely why exploration matters. A country cannot plan around resources it has not assessed, cannot build a domestic gas economy on guesswork, and cannot attract long-term infrastructure investment if the first step in the value chain is trapped in uncertainty.
For Museisi, the prize is not only barrels or molecules but the economic ecosystem around them: busier ports, more competitive fabricators, experienced engineers, technical careers for young people, stronger research institutions and small businesses integrated into a supply chain. The upstream sector, he argues, can become an anchor client for the industrial capability South Africa says it wants to rebuild. Shell’s position is that responsible offshore exploration and strong environmental and social standards are not mutually exclusive; achieving both requires ambition, discipline, trust, transparency and execution. The most controversial choice, he concludes, would not be developing oil and gas responsibly, but continuing to accept low growth, high unemployment and energy insecurity as unavoidable facts of national life. They are not. They are choices, and the question now facing policymakers in Cape Town is whether South Africa will choose ambition.