ESG
The hard work of balance For South African companies, ESG cannot be imported as global vocabulary and pasted over local conditions. Sustainability here must contend with energy security, water pressure, unemployment, inequality, infrastructure weakness, and the high cost of keeping businesses resilient. It is often a balancing act.
That is especially clear in the energy sector, where Nontokozo Hadebe, Eskom’ s Group Executive: Strategy and Sustainability, offers a useful corrective. Sustainability is often used as corporate language and is frequently biased towards the environmental side. At Eskom, she argues, it has to be broader.
A credible ESG report should not read like a victory speech. It should read like an honest account of performance, risk and responsibility: progress, shortcomings, missed targets, trade-offs and all. It should show how sustainability affects decisions on investment, procurement, operations, remuneration, and governance.
It should also resist universal language when the issues are specific. A bank, a mine, a retailer, an energy utility, and a food producer do not face the same ESG risks. Materiality is the discipline that prevents ESG from becoming a fog.
“ Sustainability is all about balance,” says Hadebe.“ We have to balance security of supply, affordability, environmental performance, and organisational sustainability.”
In a country still shaped by electricity insecurity, sustainability cannot only mean emissions reduction, important as that is. It must also ask whether electricity remains affordable, whether the organisation providing it remains viable, whether the system can support growth, and whether the transition creates long-term economic value rather than new forms of exclusion.
Hadebe points to Komati, Eskom’ s Mpumalanga coalfired power station that was decommissioned in 2022, as evidence of the cost of a single-lens approach. Its closure was part of the transition away from coal, but it also raised questions about jobs, community impact, replacement capacity, and whether affected areas were ready for the shift. Decommissioning, repurposing, repowering, and community consequence all belong in the same calculation.
This is where ESG becomes real. The test is difficulty, not declaration.
Corporate sustainability language can make hard decisions sound smoother than they are. A transition becomes a journey. Job losses become workforce optimisation. Delays become recalibration. Failure becomes a learning opportunity. Some of this language is polite. Some of it is evasive. Credibility depends on whether companies report the awkward parts as clearly as the achievements.
“ ESG now has to prove itself in the figures, the governance, and the decisions companies are prepared to defend.”
From good intentions to governance If ESG is linked to financial outcomes, resilience and long-term risk, it cannot be delegated to communications or compliance teams. It belongs in boardrooms, investment committees, risk processes and strategy discussions. Governance is what prevents sustainability from becoming an annual performance of good intentions.
Companies cannot expect stakeholders to trust ESG claims if the underlying data is weak, inconsistent, or unverifiable. The more companies link ESG to performance, the more they will need to show that their claims are measurable, traceable, and reliable.
Good ESG communication needs narrative and evidence. The story explains why an issue matters to the business. The evidence shows whether the company is doing anything meaningful about it. Bad reporting can hide behind both vagueness and volume. A hundred pages of sustainability language can still conceal the truth if the reader cannot see what matters, what changed, and what still needs to be done.
ESG has preached long enough. Its next test is proof: clearer data, harder accountability, and the courage to show the working behind the claim. �
62 sabusinessintegrator. co. za