June’s fuel sheet is doing that familiar South African thing where the numbers pull in opposite directions and the motorist still loses. Petrol is headed up, diesel is heading down, and Treasury’s temporary tax relief is quietly rolling off the table at the worst possible time. If you drive a bakkie, tow a van, or run a small fleet, this is important.
Month-end Central Energy Fund data briefly suggested a softer landing, with 95 unleaded tracking toward a 46 cent drop and diesel sitting on chunky over-recoveries. By the time the figures are translated into pump prices, that cushion has been eaten by tax normalisation, currency wobble, imported product costs, and a global oil market that still reacts like it has a short fuse.
June’s mixed numbers
The latest forecast points to 95 unleaded climbing by about R1.05 per litre. Diesel, meanwhile, gets a proper breather, with 50ppm expected to fall by around R2.79 and 500ppm by about R3.60. The official call still rests with the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, and the Slate Levy could tweak the final outcome, but petrol looks unlikely to escape into the red.
If the numbers land where they are currently pointing, 95 unleaded could sit around R26.81 a litre at the coast and about R27.68 in Gauteng from 3 June. Inland wholesale 500ppm diesel may fall to roughly R27.69. That is a mixed picture on paper. In real life, it still feels expensive, because we are coming off a brutal run of increases in April and May, when petrol rose by R3.06 and R3.27 per litre and diesel jumped by R7.37 and R6.19.
The tax rebate is disappearing
Treasury’s temporary fuel tax relief, introduced in April, is now unwinding. June puts R1.50 back into the petrol tax tally and adds R1.96 to diesel. July adds another R1.50 to petrol when the structure fully resets.
That matters because South Africa’s pump price is already loaded before a drop of fuel reaches your tank. The Basic Fuel Price, which is the imported international component, makes up roughly 45% to 50% of the final number. Taxes and levies take about a third, through the General Fuel Levy, the Road Accident Fund Levy, the Carbon Fuel Levy, and customs and excise duties. Then you still have regulated margins, storage, handling, distribution, and the zone differentials that make inland fuel pricier than coastal fuel.
So even when the oil market gives a little, the tax man still gets his slice first.
The global oil market still has a hair trigger
Those ugly April and May increases were tied to US strikes on Iran, which shoved crude prices higher by threatening traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow waterway handles about 20% of the world’s daily petroleum and LNG consumption, which is exactly why every flare-up sends traders scrambling.
The pattern has been plain. Fresh strikes push oil back up by 2% to 4%. Ceasefire talk knocks around 7% off the price. Futures traders have also built in a geopolitical risk premium of roughly $5 to $10 a barrel, because nobody wants to be caught short when tankers start diverting. Insurance gets uglier, shipping gets longer, and plenty of vessels are rerouted around Africa. Global inventories have also thinned to around 4.4 billion barrels, while refineries are already running above 91% utilisation. That leaves the market with very little slack.
For South Africa, that translates into a higher Basic Fuel Price before local taxes or margins even enter the chat.
South Africa imports more of the pain than the oil
South Africa does not sit on big onshore crude reserves. The country’s geology leans more toward coal and minerals than oil-bearing basins, which is why Sasol built coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids capacity in the first place. The offshore finds in the Outeniqua Basin, Brulpadda and Luiperd, and the exploration work near Namibia in the Orange Basin are mostly gas prospects, not neat little pools of liquid crude waiting to solve our petrol problem.
Crude imports do come largely from Africa, with Nigeria supplying more than 47%, Angola about 15%, and Ghana around 6%. But cheap crude does not magically become cheap fuel. Domestic refining has shrunk so badly that more than 60% of South Africa’s petrol and diesel now arrives as finished product, ready to be offloaded at ports like Durban and Cape Town.
That leaves the country exposed to exactly the wrong things: shipping costs, refinery margins, and very importantly – the rand-dollar exchange rate.
The refining system is hanging by a thread
South Africa can still refine crude, but only barely. Natref in Sasolburg, a Sasol and Prax Group plant with capacity of about 108,000 barrels per day, is still running and serves Gauteng. Astron Energy’s Cape Town refinery in Milnerton, a 100,000 barrel per day plant, restarted for the Western Cape after sitting shut for more than two years following the fatal 2020 explosion.
Everything else is either shut, mothballed, or converted to a different role. SAPREF in Durban, once the country’s biggest refinery at 180,000 barrels per day, was shut in 2022 after flood damage and the cost of upgrading to clean-fuel standards became too much. The Central Energy Fund bought it for R1, but it is still not operating. Engen Enref in Durban, a 135,000 barrel per day plant, was permanently closed after a late-2020 fire and turned into an import terminal. PetroSA’s GTL plant in Mossel Bay is mothballed because the offshore gas that fed it has dried up.
Sasol’s Secunda coal-to-liquids plant is doing some of the heavy lifting, but the country is still leaning hard on imported finished fuel.
The reserve buffer is too thin
South Africa does have a 45 million barrel storage site at Saldanha Bay, but the reserve story is ugly. The Strategic Fuel Fund’s 2016 sale of 10 million barrels at a deep discount weakened the position badly, and stocks have hovered around 8 million barrels since then. That works out to only about 12 to 17 days of national fuel consumption.
The global norm is a 90 day reserve. We are nowhere near that. So when oil spikes, shipping gets messy, or the rand softens, South Africa has very little buffer. The system passes the pain straight through to the forecourt.
Pretoria wants a bigger hand on the tap
Gwede Mantashe has been pushing for a long-term answer to fuel volatility and a closer look at South Africa’s dependence on imports. In his budget vote speech two weeks ago, he argued for a deeper rethink and backed the idea of a new state-owned company to play a stronger role in the sector.
That proposal will divide opinion, because state ownership in South Africa rarely arrives with clean hands or clean balance sheets. But the underlying problem is not imaginary. A country that imports most of its finished fuel, runs a thin reserve, and has only two crude refineries left open cannot pretend pump prices are being set in a stable system.
June’s adjustment is the latest reminder. Petrol goes up, diesel comes down, and the real story is the fragile machinery underneath both numbers.
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