South Africa’s monthly fuel price adjustment system — largely unchanged for decades — could soon face its biggest shake-up in years. ANC MP Fasiha Hassan-Duma has put forward a petrol price proposal that would replace monthly price-setting with reviews every two weeks, arguing that a country unable to control global oil markets can at least control how quickly it reacts to them. The idea, raised inside Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Mineral and Petroleum Resources, lands at a moment when fuel costs have become one of the most politically charged line items in household budgets across the continent.
The timing explains the urgency behind Hassan-Duma’s petrol price proposal. After conflict broke out in the Middle East at the end of February, disrupting a corridor responsible for a fifth of the world’s oil shipments, South African motorists absorbed some of the sharpest increases in years. Between March and May, petrol climbed by R6.53 a litre and diesel surged past R13. Relief has since arrived unevenly — diesel eased in June, only for petrol to rise again once Treasury’s temporary levy relief expired, and by July both fuels finally fell together. Even so, pump prices remain roughly R6 and R7 higher per litre than before the crisis began, a gap that has pushed up food and freight costs across the economy given how heavily South Africa’s logistics sector depends on diesel. You can follow the full breakdown of how the crisis unfolded month by month.
Hassan-Duma’s pitch is less about the size of any single increase and more about pacing. “You don’t look at it once a month, you look at it every two weeks,” she told the committee, arguing that a staggered response would let government soften a brutal increase today knowing it could revise the number again within a fortnight rather than locking motorists into a month-long shock. It’s a modest administrative tweak dressed up as a bigger idea: government can’t set the price of Brent crude, but it can decide how often it reprices the pain at the pump. The committee’s fuller discussion of the proposal also captured MPs warning that panic and poor communication during the crisis had created what one member called “an artificial supply problem,” as anxious motorists queued to fill tanks ahead of expected hikes.
This is where the story becomes bigger than a scheduling tweak. Fuel price volatility doesn’t stay contained to petrol stations — it ripples through African economies that rely on road freight for the bulk of goods movement, pushing up the price of bread, vegetables, and transport fares in townships and rural areas alike. The South African Reserve Bank has already responded to the inflationary pressure by lifting its repo rate to 7.0%, raising borrowing costs for anyone with a car loan or mortgage just as fuel bills climbed. Meanwhile, the Fuel Retailers Association has warned that price shocks are squeezing station owners’ fixed margins so hard that some are considering shorter trading hours or job cuts — a reminder that fuel policy isn’t only a consumer issue but a small-business survival one too.
Fasiha Hassan-Duma’s Petrol Price Proposal Could Change How South Africa Sets Fuel Costs
Hassan-Duma’s petrol price proposal also arrives alongside a separate, more contentious fight over how South Africa funds road-related liabilities more broadly. Transport Minister Barbara Creecy has confirmed a formal review of the Road Accident Fund’s financing model, partly driven by falling fuel-levy revenue as electric vehicle adoption grows. The Public Servants Association has already pushed back hard against one option reportedly on the table — a new vehicle or licence-linked tax — warning that any additional levy on already-stretched motorists would be “insensitive and unjustifiable” given the RAF’s own history of governance failures. Read alongside Hassan-Duma’s push for bi-weekly pricing, it’s clear Parliament is now workshopping several different levers at once to manage the same underlying problem: a fuel pricing and taxation system built for a calmer era.
Hassan-Duma herself is a familiar face in South African youth politics. She first gained national attention as a Wits University student leader during the 2016 #FeesMustFall protests, later becoming the youngest member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature at 25 before entering the National Assembly in 2024, where she now serves as an ANC whip. Her full political record shows a consistent focus on cost-of-living issues affecting ordinary households, which tracks with how she framed this latest proposal — less as a technical fix for the oil market and more as evidence, in her words, “that you have a government that is very responsive to what people are going through.”
Not everyone will be convinced that switching from monthly to bi-weekly pricing solves much on its own. Fuel retailers, logistics firms, and even everyday motorists would need to adapt to a faster-moving price signal, and some analysts have pointed out that the mechanism does nothing to address the underlying tax burden built into every litre sold. Motoring commentators have separately argued that a more structural fix — scrapping fuel levies altogether in favour of a distance-based tax — would do more to address the root causes of South Africa’s fuel-funding tangle than adjusting how often prices are recalculated. Whether Hassan-Duma’s proposal advances will depend on whether the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, which has yet to formally respond, decides the administrative cost of fortnightly repricing is worth the political payoff of looking responsive.
What happens next matters well beyond South Africa’s borders. Fuel-price formulas across the African continent tend to borrow heavily from each other, and a successful pilot of more frequent price reviews in Africa’s most industrialised economy could become a template other finance ministries study closely, particularly in oil-import-dependent markets facing similar volatility. For now, the proposal remains just that — a proposal — but it has already reframed a conversation that, for decades, treated the monthly fuel price announcement as an unquestioned fixture of South African life. Anyone tracking Afrikeye’s ongoing coverage of African economic policy should expect this fight over fuel pricing mechanics, and the parallel RAF funding battle, to resurface repeatedly before the Department finalises its review — a process our politics desk will continue tracking as it develops. More of our coverage of the continent’s policy landscape is available at afrikeye.com.
