Corporates buy diesel through suppliers they cannot measure.
This map covers the black-owned suppliers inside corporate fuel chains. What they supply. What they can prove. What developing them takes.
This is how Cleymand validates a venture before building it further. We publish what we find while we find it.
The buyers
The diesel volume is enormous and it is disclosed in the wrong report. Kumba's haul truck fleet alone burns around 200 million litres a year, a figure that appears in a climate document rather than a procurement one. Exxaro is further along than most: its ESD programme approved R169.8 million in 2024 across 58 qualifying small and micro enterprises, 22 of them youth-owned and 21 women-owned, and its Lephalale hub already supports sub-contractors in fuel logistics. The programme funds itself from loan repayments and scored an anticipated 13.72 out of 15 points. So the appetite exists and the intervention works. What is missing is a way to show whether a fuel supplier got stronger.
The suppliers
The suppliers exist. Nobody has mapped them. A wholesale fuel licence comes from the DMRE on form DMRE 38, with annual returns on form DMRE 30, so the state knows exactly who holds one. There is no public register. A corporate cannot query the population it is required to develop, so it develops whoever is already standing in front of it. Meanwhile the suppliers advertise hard. One search surfaces licensed black-owned wholesalers across the country: Mukundi Holdings, Nonke Petroleum and Monoka Energy each claim Level 1 status, Gulfstream Energy claims 75% black women ownership and runs on-site refuelling for mines, and African Mineral Resources and Anchor Petroleum both claim black women ownership. Every one of those claims comes from the company's own website and none is verified here, which is the point: the ownership credential is easy to assert and nobody checks it against operating evidence. Exxaro's own case studies show what an intervention costs. R10 million interest-free to Sokoma Transport and Logistics. R10 million in 2018 plus R1.3 million through lockdown to JJ Trading, which grew from 175 employees to 254. Neither is a fuel supplier. The fuel logistics sub-contractors Exxaro says it supports appear nowhere in its published case studies.
The evidence gap
The state already documents this gap, which means nobody has to take our word for it. Mining is a qualifying activity for the SARS diesel refund, and the refund turns on logbook entries showing actual diesel purchased and used, split between eligible and non-eligible use, kept for five years. A claim is not an entitlement to a refund. SARS verifies it, and anything incorrectly refunded is repaid with penalties and interest. Practitioners report claims disallowed where logbooks are incomplete, and audits reaching back years. The chain around those records is under active enforcement. In one four-month operation SARS and partner agencies detained R367 million in assets and contaminated fuel, including 953,515 litres of adulterated diesel, found six depots contravening the Customs and Excise Act, and flagged twelve tankers averaging 15,000 litres undeclared each. ITAC puts fuel adulteration alone at roughly R3.6 billion a year to the fiscus. So a supplier that cannot produce an audit trail is already losing refund money and already carries risk its customer inherits. The same logbook that satisfies SARS is the baseline that proves development happened. One evidence chain, two payoffs.
The obligation
A mining corporate answers to two rule sets at once. Under the generic codes, ESD carries 40 points plus 2 bonus. Preferential procurement takes 25 of them: 11 points for spend with suppliers at least 51% black-owned, 4 for exempted micro-enterprises, 4 for suppliers at least 30% black-woman-owned. Supplier development carries 10 points at 2% of net profit after tax, enterprise development 5 at 1%. Miss 40% of the sub-minimum and the whole B-BBEE level is discounted. A bonus point is available for graduating an enterprise development beneficiary up to supplier development level, so the codes already pay for an outcome rather than a payment. The Mining Charter adds the second layer. 70% of mining goods procurement must go to South African manufacturers, apportioned 21% to HDP-owned companies, 5% to woman or youth owned, 44% to BEE compliant. Services run to 80%. A right holder may offset 30% of the mining goods obligation and 10% of the services obligation through enterprise and supplier development investment, and that investment must reach HDP-owned companies turning over under R50 million on contracts of at least five years. One question decides how much of this reaches fuel: the 30% offset excludes non-discretionary expenditure, and diesel may sit there. Two further constraints shape any structure built on this. Spend claimed under preferential procurement cannot also be claimed as enterprise or supplier development, so the same rand never scores twice. And the 2026 draft amendments to the generic codes tighten what counts as evidence to a formal needs analysis, measurable outcomes and annual monitoring reports. Mining has no B-BBEE sector code of its own, so those amendments would land on it directly rather than waiting for a charter to be updated.
- Researching
The intervention
What developing one of those suppliers takes, and what it costs.
- One month of real depot records, read directly rather than summarised.
- Public procurement disclosures and supplier registry data.
- Sector code requirements read against actual supply chains.
- Conversations with the people who run the loads.
Nothing here is modelled from a desk. Each section publishes when the work behind it is done, and not before.
We built the supplier before we mapped the chain.
Isonke rebuilds stock reconciliation for South African wholesale fuel depots. Ntando, its co-founder, spent three years as a logistics coordinator at a Johannesburg wholesale diesel supplier. Isonke is the system that depot needed and did not have.
It is ours. 100% black-owned, 51% black-woman-owned, both founders under 35. That makes us the case study and an interested party. Both are true.
See what it does →