Wits and SA universities must cut fossil fuel ties to champion climate action

Professor Imraan Valodia, the Wits Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change, Sustainability and Inequality, has recently mounted a campaign of articles strongly disagreeing with our Carbon Captured? report, our initial attempt at outlining the various ways in which SA academia – like much of the rest of our society – is unduly influenced by the fossil fuel industry.

Valodia, and I have spoken once face to face, and we’ve been in occasional email contact since 2022. He says: “Universities should welcome scrutiny of the choices they make and the partnerships they enter into. They should be transparent, accountable and open to criticism.” 

But he has not provided Wits’ detailed Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies, as we have requested, and though he himself proposed a public panel on divestment at Wits in 2022, his enthusiasm seemed to ebb, and my last of several emails on the subject in 2024 went unanswered. 

Why should you care about this? Well, it’s not an academic issue. It’s an argument between those of us who want our country and world to have a genuinely secure and prosperous society, and those who are – unwittingly, we hope – mounting a de facto defence of the fossil fuel industry, an industry that has long blighted our society, is undermining what prosperity we have, and threatens to utterly destroy it.

“The current high rate of [global] heating documented by satellite observations and borne out by Earth’s rapidly escalating energy imbalance… would make most of our world uninhabitable for humans, and severely test the capacity of our species to prevail,” warns Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London.

A potentially uninhabitable Earth

What happens to the global economy on our way to a possibly uninhabitable Earth? Well, analysis by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK suggests that climate shocks could multiply to the point that global GDP might be halved by 2090. This is a terrifying prospect, and if it scares you as much as it scares me, I am truly sorry; to avoid these futures, we have to first face them.

Now ask yourself – how often have you heard about these possible events from one of our SA universities? Why are the institutions that are researching climate change not clearer on the deadly role of the fossil fuel industry? Why are all of these institutions still investing their endowments in that industry?

As we explore this issue, a good first stop is a 1978 US PR industry manual for industries facing regulation that advised “co-opting” academics and “identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like… It must not be too blatant”, the manual warned, “for the experts themselves must not recognise that they have lost their objectivity”.

Points of agreement

Before I explain how Valodia has misrepresented our work and recommendations and address the gaps in his arguments, I can acknowledge some points on which he is correct.

We agree that a just transition “is about transforming economies… new technologies, new industries, new infrastructure, new skills, new job opportunities, new institutions and new forms of democratic cooperation”. We agree that, “Climate policy that ignores development will fail politically and economically.”

We deeply appreciate the excellent research and teaching work being done by a great many academics in our universities, without which we could not do our own work and with whom we regularly collaborate. Our beef is not with them – it’s with our universities as institutions.

We launched our Carbon Captured? report formally on 26 August at the University of the Western Cape, in partnership with the Global Environmental Law Centre, but it has been available on our website for some time.

Our report is about extractive industry influence on universities, not just transition. Valodia, unfortunately, misrepresents our work in a number of ways in his rebuttals in University World News, the Daily Maverick and on the Wits website.

Freedom of association

Contrary to his portrayal of our report, we do believe in freedom of association and academic freedom, and believe in “exposing students to competing ideas” – ideally in circumstances in which they are not held hostage to fossil fuel industry bursaries and research grants. If fossil fuel companies truly believe in education and scholarly independence as social goods, they could fund students and researchers via blind trusts or by coughing up for the carbon tax instead of fighting it tooth and nail.

Our report’s recommendations do not include any demands for an end to all engagement, or for preventing politicians or business people from speaking on campuses, or for an end to all research collaborations. Rather, the report calls for far greater transparency and systematic disclosure of these associations, and for genuine leadership on fossil fuel phase-out, a social imperative on which the science is absolutely clear, but which our universities barely mention.

His arguments also conflate two separate issues – the proper role of a university in a Global South country, and the character of a just transition in a Global South country.

Our report was about how a truly independent university should conduct itself in a country dominated by deadly extractive special interests. It is not a report on recommendations for a just transition in South Africa, so it’s baffling that Valodia criticises us for not detailing our vision of a just transition.

This report was about the startling fact that supposedly independent academic research in climate, energy and what constitutes just transition in South Africa is dominated by fossil fuel money: more than R150-million in funding to the National Research Foundation from Sasol in the past five years, for example.

He strangely conflates the issue of removing fossil fuel influence from universities with national industrial strategy, as if Global North countries somehow manage transition without industrial strategy, which makes no sense at all. 

He also seems to confuse the specific meaning of the term “divestment” as we use it – dropping investments in fossil fuel companies from university investments funds – with the wider issue of reducing fossil fuel products in society at large, a separate issue that our report is not intended to address.  

But divesting a university’s endowment from companies like Sasol – one of our calls – need not interfere with the ability of its researchers to analyse and make recommendations on climate, energy and social policy.

The national climate policy context

Let’s look at the climate, political, and corporate context in which this debate is unfolding, because it is this context that drives our sense of urgency, a sense of urgency that we do not see anywhere in Valodia’s arguments.

In February, President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former coal mine owner, gave an address to the advisory Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), on which Valodia now serves as a commissioner. The president spoke at length about stopping climate change – without ever once naming its leading cause, the fossil fuel industry that contributed so much to his own personal wealth, or even mentioning the need for fossil fuel phase-out.

Under Ramaphosa, the government has ramped up fossil fuel subsidies, not decreased them. The elites represented by Ramaphosa and Minerals and Petroleum Minister Gwede Mantashe have twisted the concept of transition into a new excuse for delay. 

Behind the window-dressing afforded by the Presidential Climate Commission and Just Energy Transition rhetoric, Ramaphosa’s government has tripled subsidies to fossil fuels over the past eight years, with renewables in 2024 receiving just 5% of the support given to fossil fuels, according to a December 2025 report by Richard Halsey and Richard Bridle of the International Institute for Sustainable Development – trashing a 2009 G20 commitment to cut “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. As climate impacts mount, the state response is criminally reckless conduct.

Reappointed commission

The freshly reappointed commission includes more former Sasol employees (at least three) than it does climate scientists (zero). (Disclosure: a colleague and I both applied for roles as Presidential Climate Commission commissioners last year but received no acknowledgement of our applications and were not appointed.)

South Africa was conspicuously absent, a grotesque failure of our people.

In short, South Africa’s climate establishment is in denial about how to make genuine progress on stopping climate change – which demands phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible – and Wits and Valodia are part of the problem when they defend these lethal discourses of delay on the grounds that we’re a Global South country.

You cannot solve a problem without properly naming its causes. Yet our government and academic establishment repeatedly impose this new flavour of denial on us, gaslighting the public by talking about climate change as if it’s a natural phenomenon, never squarely naming the people and companies that are creating the crisis. 

Just one example: on June 16 this year, I received a Youth Day climate explainer from the Western Cape government that did not even mention fossil fuels or the fossil fuel industry. This is like discussing the student uprisings of 1976 without mentioning the apartheid government.

The climate doesn’t distinguish between Global North and South

The fossil fuel industry in South Africa has not been a true job creator for many decades, for several reasons that seem to elude Valodia, as evidenced by his limited analysis (as outlined in The Conversation in 2024) of the reasons for structural unemployment in South Africa. 

There he blamed the legacy of apartheid, but failed to explore the specific roles of extractive industries like the fossil fuel industry and how those industries have been freed by neoliberalism – the undermining of democracy and economic sovereignty by malign corporate and oligarchic power – to accelerate their exploitation of people and planet.

He does not acknowledge the resource curse: the tendency of societies with excessive dependence on resource extraction to end up being poorer, less democratic and less well developed than societies that prioritise investing in their people. 

Contrary to what you hear from the ideologues who dominate our business media, “one of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies with abundant natural resources have tended to grow less rapidly than natural-resource scarce economies”, as Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner observed in a landmark 1995 paper.

‘Externalised’ costs ignored

Valodia’s analysis of structural unemployment also ignores the many “externalised” costs of the fossil fuel economy. External costs are costs that enterprises impose on those around them, such as the health costs of air pollution from a coal power plant, but do not pay themselves. Fossil fuel companies pocket massive profits while foisting ever more massive costs from their pollution on the rest of us.

This is not hyperbole. For every person who is currently working extracting or moving coal in South Africa, or shilling for the gas industry, there is someone else struggling with their health because of the effects of indoor and outdoor air pollution, someone else struggling with an expensive and arduous commute because of urban sprawl worsened by fossil-fuel dependent urban design, someone else battling to pay their electricity bills because of coal-industry lock-in, someone else burdened with the tax bill for rehabilitating abandoned coal workings, someone else struggling to be a farmer in an ever more unpredictable and dangerous climate; another farmer poisoned by the pesticides used in fossil fuel-dependent agriculture; another voter failed by a politician funded by extractive industries. 

We can put numbers to just one of these dimensions. The International Energy Agency reckons there are about 33 million people in fossil-fuel jobs worldwide. The International Labour Organization projects that heat stress alone will cost the equivalent of 136 million full-time jobs and $2.4-trillion in output by 2030 — losses that fall hardest on agriculture and outdoor labour in the Global South. So, on just one metric – heat stress – delaying the transition doesn’t protect work; it destroys far more of it than the fossil economy sustains.

These are the extraordinary and painful dynamics contributing to our massive poverty and insistent inequality, dynamics that Valodia counts as “complexities”. But pleas of complexity cannot excuse human rights violations. 

We’re dealing with an industry that fought for spatial apartheid, gave us some of the world’s worst air pollution and resists all efforts to force it to comply with global emissions standards, an industry that continues to lobby undemocratically against even our pathetically low carbon tax, and Valodia wants us to continue entrusting it with protecting and championing jobs.

He insists that we should continue to value Sasol’s contribution to the economy, but this view is, to say the least, economically unsound. There is no net Sasol contribution to the global economy, only the illusion of a contribution to SA’s economy. Sasol itself claims to contribute about 5% of South Africa’s GDP, or $21-billion. 

But Sasol’s annual direct and indirect group emissions exceed the equivalent of 100 million tonnes of CO₂. Those emissions cause, according to recent peer-reviewed estimates (about $1,000 a tonne, Nature, 2026), annual global climate damage of about $100-billion, perhaps five times greater than the benefits.

Climate disinformation

In his response, Valodia did not once reference how the fossil fuel industry has known about climate change since the 1950s, but has systematically spent billions of dollars on climate disinformation, including at least $200-million annually since 2020 in efforts to dilute climate action, and at least $400-million in recent years to the climate-denying US president and his Republican cronies. 

He effectively ignores how our politics are profoundly distorted by extractive interests: the ANC has received substantial donations from African Rainbow Minerals, which has huge coal interests, to name but one example.

Valodia also declines to acknowledge how deliberately the fossil fuel industry uses universities to perpetuate its influence. But, as a recent US congressional report describes: “The fossil fuel industry strategically partners with universities to lend an aura of credibility to its deception campaigns while also silencing opposition voices. Fossil fuel companies establish funded partnerships with academic institutions to enhance their credibility, shape academic research programs to provide studies supportive of a prolonged life for oil and gas, leverage the resulting research to their advantage, and bolster access to policymakers.”

He further misrepresents our report in arguing that we assume that “that institutional divestment is the principal mechanism” via which universities should address climate and the role of the fossil fuel industry. We do not. Divestment is just one of several mechanisms our report recommended.

Divestment is vital

Valodia himself has argued elsewhere, correctly, that the world should be scaling up investment in renewables. So why does he consider Wits exempt from this logic? Every rand Wits currently invests in Sasol is a rand lost to scaling up clean power. 

We’re not ruling out engagement

What’s more, divestment and engagement/disassociation are completely separate issues. There would be nothing stopping Wits from mostly divesting from Sasol while continuing to engage the company. 

We engage Sasol, Thungela, Exxaro, and the asset managers who invest in them – and we own just one share in each of these companies. 

We’ve never ever seen Wits – or any other university, institutions with multibillion-rand investments and millions of stakeholders – standing up for the climate or any other issue of rights or governance, at a company AGM. True responsible stewardship dies in these circumstances.

Valodia says: “We are not in the business of preventing politicians, business leaders, activists or members of civil society from speaking simply because members of the university community disagree with them.” 

Again, he completely misrepresents us. At no point does our report call for boycotts, or excluding people from speaking. The closest we get to that is a recommendation to: “Forgo partnerships with fossil fuel companies wherever possible.” 

This is a step that has already been taken by institutions such as Wits’ Global Change Institute, previously funded by Exxaro. (Yes, until recently, Wits thought it appropriate to have a fossil fuel company sponsoring research into the deadly climate effects of fossil fuels.)

We do understand that engagement is not endorsement. We take some inspiration from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who said: “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” Tutu, by the way, directly endorsed our call for universities to divest. He knew what moral leadership looks like. 

Our report calls for more systematic and transparent disclosure of such contact – a fairly reasonable recommendation for seeking to limit the negative influence of lobbying by human rights abusers. Free academic enquiry demands free conversation, we get that. 

But it also demands data and transparency, and a sense that you know who’s trying to capture you.

Rather strangely, Valodia explains that universities have constantly reinvented themselves – but then ties himself in knots insisting that they must not reinvent themselves as campaigning institutions. This is a view that completely ignores the historical role of SA universities as sites for challenging injustice.

Context matters. In 2023, Wits Business School hosted Minister Gwede Mantashe as leader of an “Energy Transition Leadership Masterclass”, a bizarre choice, for no one in South Africa has done more to block the energy transition than Mantashe. 

We would not de-platform Mantashe – but we would insist that he share a platform with people qualified to describe in detail how his approach to development is enriching only elites, deepening unemployment, worsening climate damage and holding back our economy from fully entering the 21st century. That would be the genuine “exposure to competing ideas” that Valodia urges.

Dominated by former Sasol executives

The Wits Business School also hosts an institution called the African Energy Leadership Centre dominated by former Sasol executives. Its event lineups read like a fossil gas industry tribute act, and its mission statement is industry focused, offering no sense that society at large has a stake in how energy systems are managed or that we are in a climate emergency.

We’re not saying Wits should never employ former Sasol people. But the onus is on those departments that do to visibly demonstrate scholarly independence.

We do not believe that Valodia is under the direct sway of the fossil fuel industry. He no doubt genuinely believes he’s independent and objective – as the industry playbook we quoted early on requires. But he’s part of an institutional atmosphere that discourages genuinely open debate about these issues. As our report describes, there is little sense in our universities that these issues can be freely and openly debated. 

None of the UCT academics who contributed writing to our report felt safe putting their names to it, even though they are within an institution that already has a divestment commitment. If he genuinely thinks our work raises important questions, if that assertion is more than a rhetorical gambit, then he could have taken a scholarly approach and invited us to debate it at Wits.

Valodia asks for unequivocal evidence of capture. Our report is indeed strongly suggestive rather than conclusive. We do not claim otherwise. But his many silences on matters of substance and his refusal to offer specific mechanisms to support his claims of transparency are evidence either of capture or of very serious institutional blind spots. The overwhelming reluctance of most SA universities to even consider divestment from an industry engaged in mass human rights violations is the most damning evidence of all.

Our challenge to Wits (and all SA universities)

So here’s our call to Wits and Valodia: show us your projections for climate damage to the South African economy, and explain how your timetable for the transition is going to forestall that damage. 

Publish your Environmental, Social and Governance policies. Show us how they meet or surpass the engagement standards set by our colleagues at Just Share. 

If you engage in research collaborations with fossil fuel companies, be very clear in your public communications about the emissions profiles of those companies, about whether they have detailed science-based emissions reductions targets, and if they are meeting those targets.

Fully acknowledge that an industry that “imperils all forms of life”, as the world’s highest court advises, is an industry already engaged in ongoing mass human rights violations.

Create voluntary consolidated public registries for all forms of on-campus engagement with the fossil fuel industry. Invite your departments and faculties and student societies to freely endorse, or not, our FFSA Campus Climate Leadership Pledge. Follow the science. Become vocal advocates for complete fossil fuel phase-out. Endorse the Fossil Fuel Treaty. 

Divest from fossil fuels – just as many overseas universities did in the 1980s, pressure that in Nelson Mandela’s view was vital to overturning the apartheid regime: “Without the decades-long divestment campaign undertaken by university students, churches, civil rights organisations, trade unions, and state and local governments to cut economic ties to South Africa, the US Congress would not have acted.”

All these things can be done without compromising free academic enquiry or ending all engagement with industry. (But also show us the evidence that your engagement is effective.)

We challenge you and Wits Vice-Chancellor Zeblon Vilakazi to engage us in an open public dialogue, or debate if need be, on these issues. DM