Part 4 of our fuel shock coverage. Part 1: Middle East Crisis: What the Fuel Shock Means for South Africa’s Cold Chain. Part 2: A River Full of Crocodiles. Part 3: The River Is Bursting Its Banks.

Keeping Score

On 20 March 2026 this site published A River Full of Crocodiles. It argued that South Africa was watching one threat, the April fuel shock, while five others closed on the same bank: Food, Energy, Money, People and Silence. It also did something analysis often avoids. It put numbers on what would happen next.

Seven months later, those numbers can be checked. Some were right. Two were wrong, and one of them badly. An analysis that only revisits its correct calls is marketing, so this is the full scorecard, and what the misses tell us.

The Scorecard

What we said in March	What happened by November	Verdict
April diesel up 39–44% in one gazette	Up R7.37–R7.51/l on about R18.60: roughly 40%	Right
April is “a floor, not a ceiling”	Another R5.77/l in May; a record R31.95/l (0.05%, inland wholesale) in October	Right
Food inflation 6–7% by Q3	1.2% in September; meat 0.7%; cereals in deflation for eight months	Wrong
Headline CPI 5.0–5.8% by Q3	4.5% in September	Wrong, too high
A rate hike of 25–50 basis points in H2	Repo +25 bp to 7.25% on 23 September	Right
Load shedding “suppressed, not resolved”; the grid would be tested	No load shedding through winter; Eskom diesel spend down 82%	Not tested; the grid held
Strategic reserve: two weeks; refining below 35%	Still about 13 days; imports now 61% of supply; Sapref still idle, with a plan	Unchanged
Hormuz disruption persists	Traffic still below 60% of capacity; Brent $93–100	Right

The Fuel Crocodile Grew

The visible crocodile turned out to be bigger than the March article predicted, not smaller.

Inland wholesale diesel (0.05% sulphur), approximately:

March: R18.60 per litre
April: up R7.37, one of the largest single increases on record
May: up a further R5.77, peaking at about R31.18
July: eased to about R24.80, helped by temporary levy relief
September: back up R2.94
October: up R2.84, to a record R31.95 (the 0.005% grade reached R33.29)
November: down R1.10, to R30.85

On the November price, diesel costs about 66% more than in March. That figure flatters reality, because the November cut is not what it looks like.

The November Cut Is a Loan

The R1.10 drop is a temporary levy cut doing more work than the oil price:

The general fuel levy on diesel is R3 per litre lower from 4 November to 1 December. A smaller cut continues to 5 January, and then the full levy returns.
At the same time, a slate levy of 135.84c/l was added to petrol and diesel. The fuel price slate, the fund that smooths price changes, ended September R15.9 billion in deficit. The pump is now paying it back.
Without the temporary relief, inland diesel would sit at about R33.85, which is 83% above March.

For operators this is the most useful fact in the whole update. Two diesel increases are already scheduled, in December and January, whatever the oil price does. They are the first price steps in seven months that can be priced into contracts before they arrive.

Where Did the Diesel Go?

This is the question the scorecard raises. Diesel is up two-thirds. Road freight carries more than 80% of South Africa’s land freight. Yet food inflation sits at 1.2%. If fuel costs that much more, why is the shelf not showing it?

We tested one popular explanation first: that US tariffs, the loss of trade preferences and the Gulf disruption forced exporters to sell at home, flooding the local market. The data does not support it for 2026. Agricultural exports grew: up 11% in the first quarter and 10% in the second, to US$4.1 billion. Exports to the United States rose 56% once the tariff fell from 30% to 12.5%. Diversion happened only at the edges. Gulf-bound fruit was held or redirected in March and April, mostly to the UK and Europe. Beef exports halved because foot-and-mouth disease closed China, the UK and neighbouring markets. And beef is the proof that a closed export door does not automatically mean cheap food at home: the same disease cut supply even harder, and beef inflation reached 12.7% in June.

The shelf stayed quiet for four other reasons:

The harvest. The 2025/26 La Niña season delivered about 21.7 million tonnes of grain and oilseeds. Cereal products have been in deflation for eight months, and fruit, nuts and vegetables are in deflation on large supplies.
Cheap feed, cheap chicken. Feed and day-old chicks make up over 80% of the cost of a broiler. The same harvest made feed cheaper, local chicken production grew, and producer prices rose only about 3% in a year. Chicken is the meat South Africa eats most, so it holds the meat index down.
An import surge. South Africa took about 185,000 tonnes of Brazilian chicken in the first half of 2026, 38% more than a year earlier. Precautionary pork imports during the swine fever outbreaks turned a feared shortage into a glut, and wholesale pork fell from about R40/kg to R30/kg by July.
Weak demand. Analysts note that weaker demand for red meat limited how far disease shortages reached retail prices. Part of the low inflation is shoppers trading down, which is the People Crocodile from March, showing up as a quiet price index.

The cost did not disappear. The Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders estimates that fuel is about 43% of road freight operating costs, and that every 10% rise in diesel adds about 4.3% to those costs. Apply that to a 66% diesel increase and a truck costs roughly 28% more to run than in March, at the same efficiency. That is our arithmetic on their ratio, not a published figure, but the direction is not in doubt. The GAIN Group’s State of Logistics 2026 puts South Africa’s total logistics bill at R1.156 trillion this year, 14.6% of GDP and R147 billion more than in 2025.

R147 billion more for logistics, and food inflation at 1.2%. Not all of that R147 billion is fuel, but the gap is being absorbed somewhere between the farm and the till: by carriers, cold stores and distributors. Part 3 of this series called it the 60-day trap. A carrier pays for diesel today and recovers it, if at all, two months later through a rate increase that only applies to new loads. Eight monthly adjustments later, the trap has been reset every month.

This is why the food-inflation miss matters more than the hits. Low shelf inflation is not evidence that the cold chain is coping. It may be evidence that the cold chain is paying.

The Buffer Moved Ashore

The Crocodiles article did not cover one cost, and it surprised us.

In August and September, The Frozen Food Courier® took calls from producers supplying a major food retailer and a national food-service distributor. Each was looking for cold storage for about 200 extra pallets a week. Retail sales were not booming. If anything, sell-through had slowed, and prices were being set to move stock. So why the sudden need for space?

The answer is in the shipping. Most Asia–Europe services still sail around the Cape, adding roughly 10–14 days per voyage. Analysts point out that the world does not lack reefer containers. Too many of them are at sea at any one time, tied up on longer rotations. In the last week of October, vessels waited an average of about 7.5 days to berth at Durban, with high yard use and long import dwell times. During the citrus peak in August, Durban’s reefer plugs ran close to full.

When transit times become longer and less predictable, the safety stock that used to sit on a ship moves into a cold store:

Imports arrive in lumps. Importers were advised from March to pull orders forward and raise safety stock on critical lines. The Brazilian chicken surge arrived the same way. Frozen product has to come out of the reefer quickly, because the carrier wants its box back and detention charges run by the day. It goes into a cold store.
Exports wait for ships. Gulf-bound fruit sat in cold storage in South African hubs while exporters found new routes. Earlier in the year, 1,688 containers were reported in cold storage at the Port of Cape Town, unable to load.
Stock turns slowly. When shoppers trade down and sell-through slows, every pallet stays in the cold store longer.

A cold store’s demand is volume multiplied by time. Volumes in 2026 barely moved. Time went up at every step: at sea, at the berth, in the import cycle and on the shelf.

And the space is tight. Industry estimates put South Africa’s third-party cold storage at about 420,000 pallet positions, concentrated in Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Flexible, short-term space for smaller producers is the scarcest part. A producer who needs 200 extra pallets of space a week, at short notice, is asking for the one thing the market has least of.

This is another line in the hidden bill. Someone pays for every extra day a pallet sits at −18 °C: the producer who rents the space, the importer whose working capital is tied up in stock, and the cold store running compressors through a hot summer on a higher electricity tariff.

The Crocodiles That Stayed Under

Credit where it is due. Eskom met winter demand without load shedding. Its energy availability factor reached its highest level since 2020. Diesel spend in the year to early September fell from R5.93 billion to R1.08 billion, with the open-cycle gas turbines running at a 1.11% load factor. The March article warned that the grid would be tested. It was not, and the Generation Recovery Plan deserves the credit.

But notice what the two misses have in common. Food stayed cheap because of a good harvest, and the grid held because demand never pushed it to the edge. Both depend on the weather. The South African Weather Service said on 30 September that El Niño is strong and likely to strengthen to very strong through the 2026/27 summer, with below-normal rainfall likely over most of the north-eastern half of the country. The summer crops planted now (maize, soya, sunflower) are the ones El Niño hits. Hot summers also make refrigeration plants work harder, since every compressor rejects heat into warmer air.

The crocodiles that stayed under in winter are the ones El Niño feeds in summer.

The Structure Has Barely Moved

The Energy Crocodile was always about structure, and the structure is where it was in March:

Refining: imported refined products now make up about 61% of supply, up from 22% in 2019. In September the Central Energy Fund set out a three-phase plan to revive refining at the former Sapref site, targeting 400,000 barrels a day. Phase one uses the existing storage to import finished product. It is a plan, not a restart date.
The cost of import dependence: SARB economists estimate the oil import bill for 2021–2024 could have been R76 billion lower had refined imports stayed at their historical 25% share. A separate study puts the extra cost to fuel importers since the conflict began in February at at least R56 billion.
Strategic stocks: still about 7.7–8 million barrels, roughly 13 days. A draft policy published in July would oblige wholesalers and importers to hold 21 days of cover at their own cost, with state stocks of 60 days rising to 90. It was released for public comment. We have found no record that it has been adopted.
Money: the Reserve Bank raised the repo rate to 7.25% in September and expects inflation above 5% in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2027. Its next decision is on 19 November. Every overdraft that bridges the 60-day trap now costs more.
Hormuz: commercial traffic is still below 60% of capacity, and tanker attacks this week pushed Brent back towards $100.

What Operators Should Do Before December

Price the scheduled levy steps now. The December and January increases are known in advance. A fuel clause tied to the monthly DMPR adjustment recovers them in days instead of the 60-day cycle. For an operator without one, this is the first increase in seven months that can be agreed before it lands.
Don’t let low food inflation set the tone of rate talks. Customers will point to the shelf. Point to the diesel path: R18.60 in March, R30.85 now, R33.85 underneath.
Prepare for a hot, dry summer, not a dark one. The grid held, but El Niño raises refrigeration load and puts water and crops under pressure. Check cold-hold times and generator readiness anyway, because the open-cycle turbines are dormant, not gone.
Book cold storage before you need it. The festive build, the start of the stone fruit and citrus seasons and slower stock turns are arriving together. Short-notice space is the scarcest kind, so agree overflow capacity, and its price, now.
Plan finance, not just fuel. At 7.25% with inflation expected above 5%, the cost of carrying fuel costs for 60 days has risen with the diesel price. A shorter payment cycle is worth as much as a better rate.

The River in November

In March the argument was that the convergence, not any single crocodile, was the danger. Seven months on, the picture is more specific.

The crocodile everyone was watching grew larger than forecast. A new cost appeared that we had not named: time, as stock waited longer at sea, at the berth and in the cold store. Two that we feared stayed under, thanks to a good harvest and a stronger grid. But they stayed under because of the weather, and the weather is turning. The structure beneath it all, from refining to reserves, has produced plans but not capacity.

And the shock that should have shown on the shelf has not. It has gone into the middle of the chain, into the margins of the carriers and cold stores that keep food cold between the farm and the till. That is the part of the river nobody is filming.

Sources & References

About these sources

Fuel prices are inland wholesale figures for 0.05% sulphur diesel unless stated, from the monthly adjustments published by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources and reported in the sources below. The operating-cost estimate in “Where Did the Diesel Go?” is ColdChainSA’s own arithmetic on the ratio published by the Southern African Association of Freight Forwarders, shown so readers can check it.

Logistics costs

SA now ranks 7th highest in Africa for petrol prices as logistics costs surge to R1.156 trillion, Cape Chamber of Commerce, 29 October 2026. GAIN Group State of Logistics 2026; SAAFF fuel-share estimate.

Inflation, rates and food

Consumer inflation rises for a second straight month, Statistics South Africa, 21 October 2026. September CPI 4.5%; food and non-alcoholic beverages 1.2%; meat 0.7%.
MPC raises repo rate to 7.25%, SAnews, 23 September 2026.
MPC Decision September 2026, Nedbank Group Economic Unit. SARB inflation outlook.

Energy and refining

Eskom fully meets 2026 winter demand, Eskom, September 2026. EAF, diesel expenditure R1.08 billion, OCGT load factor 1.11%.
Central Energy Fund sets out plan to restore refining at former Sapref site, TimesLIVE, 10 September 2026.
South Africa Plans Oil-Refining Revival to Cut Import Dependence, Bloomberg, 9 September 2026. Import share 61%.
Refinery closures cost South Africa R76bn in extra fuel imports, Business Day, 14 September 2026. SARB economists’ notes; Crea estimate.
Mantashe wants oil firms to stockpile 21 days of fuel, at their cost, TimesLIVE, 13 July 2026.
We do the maths on Mantashe’s new plan to secure South Africa’s fuel, Daily Maverick, 16 July 2026.

Hormuz and oil

Trump weighs Iran strikes or deal as oil prices drop to $93, Gulf News, November 2026.
Brent Crude Hits $100 As Tanker Attacks Disrupt Hormuz, Whalesbook, November 2026.

Weather and agriculture

Uncertainty is high as the 2026-27 summer crop season starts, Wandile Sihlobo, Daily Maverick, 11 October 2026.
El Niño, oil shocks and hunger mean SA needs a synchronised food strategy, Daily Maverick, 15 October 2026.
Fuel hike hits summer planting and fruit exports, Agri News, 10 October 2026.

Operational disclosure

The publisher of ColdChainSA also operates The Frozen Food Courier®, a refrigerated courier service active in Gauteng and the Western Cape. It faces the same diesel exposure described in this article.

Seven Months in the River: Scoring the Crocodiles