On a Tuesday morning in Tembisa, Nokukhanya Dlamini leaves her house at five-fifteen. She walks twelve minutes to a taxi rank on Isithebe Street, pays R22 to reach the Kempton Park interchange, changes taxis, pays R18 more to reach the Midrand industrial park where she works as a cleaner. The round trip costs R80. She earns R4,200 a month. Before she has bought a kilogram of mealie meal or recharged her electricity token, transport has claimed nineteen percent of her income — and that figure has risen steadily for eighteen months.
South Africa's Basic Fuel Price is set monthly by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources using a weighted basket of international crude prices and the rand-dollar exchange rate. Since October 2024, that basket has moved decisively against consumers: Brent crude averaged $89 a barrel through the first quarter of 2026, and the rand traded persistently weak, touching R19.40 to the dollar in February. The result is a pump price of R26.14 per litre for 95 Unleaded in Gauteng — a twenty-three percent increase on the R21.28 recorded in September 2024. The number is technical and abstract until you do Nokukhanya's arithmetic.
For the taxi industry — which moves an estimated 69 percent of South Africa's daily commuting population — the fuel price is not a line item. It is the operating margin. Siphamandla Ntuli has driven a fourteen-seater Toyota Quantum on the Mamelodi-to-Pretoria CBD route for eleven years. His vehicle averages roughly 10 kilometres per litre fully loaded across the 28-kilometre route. To break even before meeting his association fees and a R6,200 monthly vehicle payment, he needs to complete at least eleven full runs each day. "If the price goes up another rand," he says, "I either increase fares or I drive at a loss. There is no third option."
Every time the price goes up, I do the maths again. I always come out on the wrong side.
Delivery riders — the gig economy workers who carry food orders and parcels across South African cities on 150cc motorcycles — face a different but equally inescapable arithmetic. Unlike taxi operators, they cannot pass fuel costs on: the platforms set the per-kilometre rate, and that rate has not been adjusted since August 2024. Themba Khumalo, who rides simultaneously for three apps from his base in Brixton, Johannesburg, estimates his weekly fuel spend at R380. He keeps a notebook — columns of dates and amounts going back two years. "In October 2024 I spent R214 a week. Now it is R380. My earnings are exactly the same."
What the fuel price does to working-class South Africa rarely appears in automotive journalism, which tends to concern itself with the inconveniences of people who own cars outright. The township commuter's relationship to petroleum is involuntary and total: the taxis she relies on run on petrol, the food prices at her local spaza are set partly by diesel delivery costs, and the informal economy in her neighbourhood depends on small trucks and bakkies that cannot be easily converted to anything else. Fuel poverty — spending more than ten percent of household income on energy — was documented in 1.8 million South African households in 2024. Researchers believe that number has since risen sharply.
Nokukhanya keeps a notebook too. In it she records exactly what she spends each week and what she manages to save. The savings column has been empty since November. She does not speak about this with anger, exactly — more with the flat, precise tone of someone who has done the maths too many times to be surprised by the answer. "People always say you must budget," she says, standing at the taxi rank as the morning rush assembles around her. "I do have a budget. The problem is the budget doesn't work anymore."
