Is JETP the savior of South Africa - or is it about to make the embattled country’s problems worse?

Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) is a multi-year project to assist South Africa with decarbonisation, with the support of governments around the world, including France, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and the European Union, also known as the International Partners Group (IPG). 

However, just four years after its announcement JETP is under heavy scrutiny, experts say the groundbreaking multi-billion-dollar scheme to decarbonise South Africa is now under threat of collapse, against a backdrop of a local economy addicted to coal, skyrocketing coal imports to the EU, claims of modern colonisation, concerns over transparency, and crumbling support. 

Europe's decision to dramatically increase coal imports from South Africa - just months after announcing the JETP plan - raises doubts about how serious they really are about helping the country move away from coal. On the surface, JETP looks like a way to transition South Africa toward cleaner energy, but when you take a closer look, it's unclear who will actually benefit and whether there’s a real long-term strategy in place.

Celine Tan, who is a professor of International Economic Law and co-director of the Centre for Law, Regulation and Governance of the Global Economy, has spent almost a year leading an investigation into the financing of energy transitions in developing countries. Tan says that JETP in South Africa has been ‘rushed’ and is ‘politically expedient’. 

"[JETP] is so ambitious but it has not really been thought through - we have heard from partners it has been very chaotically done." Celine said that her research had thrown up a multitude of issues, from an apparent lack of reskilling and relocating workers to a lack of assessment on energy needs, to disruption from new green energy systems such as dams or hydrogen plants, to the type of financing - the list goes on. 

"The quality of financing is suspect," she says. "A lot of it is debt-based and loans. When we looked into types of financing, there were a lot of guarantees, blended finance, and pledges to go into joint ventures."

The South African JETP has a lot riding on its shoulders. This is a pilot project to demonstrate how developing countries can be supported in decarbonising by developed countries through public and private investment, and transition to a low-emission, climate-resilient economy.The EU says the partnership is expected to prevent up to 1-1.5 gigatonnes of emissions over the next 20 years, more than 50 times the yearly emissions of London. To date, international pledges to the South African JETP are at $12.8 billion (R229bn).

A report from the Project Management Unit (JET PMU), which was set up in the South Africa’s President Office in January 2023, reveals that out of the $12.8bn llocated, only $764 million is free funding (grants). More than $8bn comes as loans that must be repaid, and just under $2bn is in export credits, meaning much of the money is not simply being given to South Africa - it is tied to conditions.

Nearly $9bn of the $12.8bn comes from partner countries, while the rest is made up by multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank. According to the first quarter report of 2025, $583m of the grants have been allocated, with the majority going into electricity, green hydrogen, and the just transition in Mpumalanga, South Africa’s biggest coal mining region.

Alex Lenferna, the founder of Climate Justice Coalition (CJC), questions the funding techniques and says it is crucial to protect ordinary working people and ensure renewable energy is affordable and accessible.

"With JETP, there is a big push with foreign investment, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. With the liberalisation of energy markets, they are opened up to the private sector, meaning those who have access to wealth can most take advantage," Lenferna said.

The Africa Climate Alliance argues that climate financing through debt can have crippling effects and that to decarbonise, debt relief is crucial. ‘Debt relief and fair carbon finance is essential in allowing countries to reinvest in sustainable industries instead of relying on coal revenues’.

Member of Parliament Kevin Mileham, who sits on the Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy, says the loan funding built into JETP is a huge debt burden on South Africa’s already fragile economy. For this reason alone, he says that JETP needs to be urgently rethought.

"I think that the whole program probably needs a review of what its goals are and how they are going to be implemented, Mileham said.

Mileham says that if the transparency and implementation of JETP do not drastically improve, in five years the money will have been "frittered away and there won't be anything to show for it."

President Cyril Ramaphosa entrusted the JETP to the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), a multi-stakeholder body tasked with overseeing the facilitation and creation of a framework to meet the objectives of the JETP. 

In 2023, the PCC released the JET Investment Plan (JETIP), outlining a vision and investment strategy for the first five years while aligning with its defined just transition principles. The same year, JET PMU was established by the Presidency to provide an implementation roadmap for the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan.

The Just Energy Transition Project Management Unit (JET PMU) published a detailed Grant Register that shows where grant funding has been allocated, but no such document exists for the loans. During the fanfare of the new scheme, many of the declared loans were apparently allocated even before an investment plan was released, meaning that projects developed and paid for pre-JETP were added to the IPG’s JETP grants. 

Tracey Davies, the executive director of Just Share, a South African non-profit shareholder activist organisation, says the Grant Register was picked up by media in February 2024, and showed that since November 2021, R10bn (about $591m) had been allocated to 145 projects. By the time the JET Investment Plan was unveiled by President Cyril Ramaphosa on November 4, 2022, 89 of the 145 projects, worth more than R5.3bn, had already commenced.\

"I don't see any evidence of that overarching plan. The projects are disparate and don't appear to link up to each other. A lot of them are repeating work that's already been done. There's no clarity on how the loans and the concessional loan funding are being managed. And as far as I can tell, nobody outside the IPG or the PMU has a handle on how that money is being allocated. I mean, nobody knows," Davies said.

Julia Taylor, a researcher on Climate and Inequality at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, worries that JETP funding is not nearly enough to meet the demands of South Africa's social, environmental, and energy issues, particularly because of the low levels of grant funding.

She also argues that the JETP has not generated significant new grant funding but has taken existing projects and labelled them JETP projects, with grant funding going to consultants and private sector companies doing feasibility studies into areas she believes are not critical to South Africa, such as green hydrogen.

'‘People who are most interested in green hydrogen are European countries like Germany. And there's been a huge push from those countries for alternative fuel sources. The idea is that we'll then export back to them. Is that in the interest of South Africa's just transition? I don't think so…we don't even have enough electricity ourselves to run our economy. Why would we then be building more renewable energy for green hydrogen?," Taylor said.

Getting word from some government departments involved in JETP seems to back up the air of confusion and opacity around the scheme. A government spokesman said that the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), charged with leading sustainable development in South Africa’s mining and energy sectors, “ceased to exist as of March 31, 2025”, meaning they would not discuss anything prior to that point and redirected us to the PCC.

When we reached out to the PCC for comments, Blessing Manale, the head of communications and outreach could not provide us with answers to many of our questions noting that the PCC is not in a “position to respond”. Manale noted that the “PCC supports the JETP. When the JETP was released, we made recommendations on strengthening it. We collaborate with the JET_IP PMU in its implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation of its impact. We have made additional recommendations on various aspects of Climate Finance.”

On the ground

But on the ground in Mpumalanga, people are unsure. Mpumalanga has been singled out by the JETIP as being a region in dire need of support if a just transition is to be achieved. The region holds approximately 80% of the nation's 11 billion tons of recoverable coal, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Here, locals are worried about the JETP’s impact on their livelihoods.

Cosatu spokesperson Zanele Sabela says many of the mining sector’s 480 000 workers could be left behind. "If not handled responsibly, the transition to green energy could have dire consequences for workers and their families, and the economy as a whole. As it is, South Africa has high levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality," Sabela says.

The effects of this inequality can be seen everywhere in the city, with tales of armed warfare amongst rival taxi gangs, while billboards invite the rich to invest in the bullet-proof armor for their Mercedes that is advertised on billboards next to the freeway. The Constitution Hill precinct is the seat of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and a reminder of the struggle of black South Africans. For those living in tents and sleeping under the stars in Joubert Park which sits just below it, the struggle is still very real.You don’t need to travel too far to see the devastation that is also caused by mining, and the drastic unemployment that already blights communities around major mining areas.

Phola is a  town in Mpumalanga, surrounded by mines that include Klipspruit, an opencast mine owned by Seriti Resources that largely supplies European markets. The town is marred by unemployment, and demonstrations for better rights, and seems abandoned by the outside world. Community areas are filled with garbage merging in towering piles, and locals say that there are issues with water supply. 

Nkosana Mavuso, a local youth activist who started the “MP Rise Podcast” (MP for Mpumalanga), agrees to an interview in the back of our hire car, parked up in the crumbling center of Phola. He tells us there are high suicide rates, especially among 18 to 35-year-olds, with one of his friends recently taking his own life. "Poverty is the cause, and people here are not employed."

Our analysis of Global Coal Mine Tracker data reveals that South Africa is expected to see a growth in mining activity - as of April 2024, 65 of South Africa’s 82 operating coal mines are located in Mpumalanga and there are 23 proposed mines - six of which are under construction. The proposed mines could add more than 62 million tonnes per annum to Mpumalanga’s production.

Guarding against green colonialism

Sonja Boschoff, a member of the National Council of Provinces representing the Mpumalanga province, says that South Africa must make sure it's in charge of its own transition to avoid green colonialism and must ‘guard against a transition imposed and dominated by external actors’. 

Many people worry that European companies are simply using JETP for their own profit margins and a future foothold in South Africa’s green energy horizon. We also spoke to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black nationalist political party.

Commissar Mkhululi (Kusta) Dlevu, member of the Central Command Team, said JETP in its current form is simply a Trojan horse for foreign companies to take control of South Africa’s energy sector. ‘We must ensure that we don't allow foreign interests to dictate our own energy policies. JETP is structured in a manner that it will benefit only the white monopoly capital.’

Around 7000 nautical miles from South Africa’s biggest coal exporting port, in the cold, murky waters of the North Sea, rusty bulk carriers weighing tens of thousands of tonnes are berthing on the grey docks of Rotterdam to unload vast quantities of coal.

Just months after the EU announced the JETP and its commitment to supporting South Africa in a just phase-out of coal, Europe’s coal imports from South Africa increased eightfold, reaching 3.54 million tons by 2024 - a 77% increase over 2021, according to Reuters. Much of this renewed interest came after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the EU imposed sanctions on Russian coal and gas, causing European countries to turn to other coal suppliers, including South Africa.Key European importers of South Africa’s coal include some of JETP’s biggest donors, including the EU, Germany, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands, according to The Coal Trader.  

David Hallowes, a coal researcher at the South African non-profit GroundWork, thinks that the EU’s attempt to help South Africa decarbonize is being undone by its own coal imports from the region.

‘This contradiction undermines Europe’s decarbonisation efforts and raises serious questions about the sincerity of its support for South Africa's transition and about the responsibility of these coal companies involved to address the socioeconomic, environmental and health impacts of their activities in South Africa.’EU officials told our investigation that "while there is a general direction from the European Commission to diversify where to source coal, it is individual companies and Member States that decide for themselves in line with their respective needs,’ adding, ‘there are no specific provisions on coal or on ethical coal as such".

The IEA reports that global coal use was at an estimated 8.77 billion tonnes in 2024, the highest ever. On March 6, 2025, just weeks after it pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement for the second time, the USA scrapped its commitment to supporting South Africa under the JETP program and put the fate of the project in the EU’s hands.Ultimately, it would seem logical that the EU cannot use South African coal reserves as an emergency supply to dip into when needed while funding the country’s decarbonization.

Jule Fink from Ende Gelände, a German-based alliance of anti-nuclear and anti-coal movements, says: "You can’t pretend to be funding energy transitions on the one hand, while, at the same time, funding the coal sector. That is just completely contradictory."

Addressing this apparent conflict of interest is key to the future of South Africa. 

Jack Wolf is an investigative researcher, filmmaker and artist living in Berlin, Germany. Oliver Stallwood is an investigative journalist based in Berlin. Sakhile Dube is an environmental and tech journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

* * This article was supported by Journalismfund Europe

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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