Repositioning And Promoting Energy Investments Between South Africa And Nigeria: A Perspective On Trade Secrets

1. INTRODUCTION

There was a time when many clamoured for a democratic approach towards commercial secrets, the logic being that it ensured commercial morality by guaranteeing the right of the public to know and preventing small classes of capitalists from profiting at the public's expense.¹ But it did not take long to realise that the democratisation of commercial secrets not only stifles creative invention but constitutes a significant risk to investments, especially large-scale and highly technical investments of the kind that define modern energy systems.²

There is a truism in the world of investment that capital is a coward; it flees from risks, and only ventures into territories where it can be protected.³ Due to the enormous scale of most energy projects, the industry thrives on trade secrets across every segment of its value chain. The protection of these intellectual property assets, which some have aptly labelled informational capitalism, serves to hedge against the vast array of investment risks.⁴ It is this reality — the centrality of proprietary information to investment viability, that animates the theme of this discourse.

The focus of this brief is specifically on a bilateral energy investment relationship between Nigeria and South Africa: two nations that represent, by any objective commercial assessment, the most logical and most strategically significant energy partnership on the African continent. Nigeria possesses what South Africa urgently needs while South Africa possesses what Nigeria critically lacks. The question before us is what legal and institutional architecture is required to translate that complementarity into durable, bankable energy investment relationships.

2. THE TWO ENERGY ECONOMIES — A NATURAL PARTNERSHIP

2.1 Nigeria: A Market Transformed by Legislative Reform

Nigeria's energy endowments are extraordinary. Total proven natural gas reserves stand at approximately 210.54 trillion cubic feet, the largest on the African continent, with a reserve life index of about 93 years. Crude oil production averaged roughly 1.55 million barrels per day in 2024, augmented with government-backed ambitions of hitting 2 million barrels per day.

However, the more consequential story is legislative. The Petroleum Industry Act 2021 (PIA)⁵ constitutes the most comprehensive overhaul of Nigeria's petroleum legal framework in the country's history, repealing about ten existing petroleum laws in a single act. Among its most significant provisions, the PIA transformed NNPC into NNPC Limited, an independent commercial entity freed from institutional constraints and repositioned to operate as a profit-oriented national oil company capable of attracting commercial partnerships. The PIA simultaneously established two separate regulatory bodies, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Commission (NUPRC) for upstream operations and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) for midstream and downstream operations, providing the investment community with clearly delineated, predictable governance.

Recognising that these structural reforms alone were insufficient to reverse declining upstream investment, President Tinubu went further on 6^th March 2024, to introduce three Executive Orders on fiscal incentives for non-associated gas, midstream and deepwater developments; streamlining contract approval processes; and promoting cost efficiency in local content requirements, each crafted after extensive cross-ministerial benchmarking against international best practice.

For the electricity sector, the transformation has been equally pronounced. The Electricity Act 2023,⁶ signed into law on 6^th June 2023, represents the extant and most significant restructuring of Nigeria's power sector in nearly two decades. Its most consequential innovation is the decentralisation of the power sector, empowering Nigerian states for the first time to create their own electricity markets, establish state regulatory bodies, and issue licences to investors across the generation, transmission, and distribution value chain. Approximately sixteen states have already enacted their own electricity legislation, creating a diverse ecosystem of regulatory environments and commercial and investment opportunities across the country.

This subnational opening is further reinforced at the off-grid level by the NERC Mini-Grid Regulations 2026,⁷ which took effect on 13^th April 2026. The regulation provides guidelines for the development, operation, and oversight of mini-grids, particularly in unserved and underserved communities. The framework is designed to accelerate rural electrification, attract private sector investment, and ensure consumer protection within Nigeria's power sector. Isolated mini-grids may now operate at capacities of up to 5MW, while interconnected systems may scale up to 10MW. Mini-grid projects below 100kW are required to register with NERC, while those above that threshold must obtain a formal operating permit. For South African clean energy developers, this framework represents a structured, low-capital entry point into the Nigerian power market with defined regulatory expectations and investor protections.

The upstream investment environment is further energised by Nigeria's ongoing 2025/2026 licensing round. With 50 blocks on offer spanning onshore, shallow water, deep offshore, and frontier basins, the NUPRC is targeting an ambitious $10 billion in new investment. Signature bonuses have been deliberately reduced to between $3 million and $7 million, calibrated to increase competitiveness and respond to global capital mobility. The NUPRC has publicly stated that production upside potential from the offered blocks could reach as much as 400,000 barrels per day when projects are fully developed.

The historical precedent for South African investment confidence in Nigeria's emerging regulatory frameworks is instructive. When Nigeria liberalised its telecommunications sector, the government offered Vodafone a digital mobile licence at the symbolic value of one dollar, an offer Vodafone declined. It was MTN, a South African company, that chose to bet on Nigeria at a time when the investment case was deeply uncertain. MTN entered the Nigerian market in August 2001, launching what became the country's telecommunications revolution. Today, MTN Nigeria controls the group's largest market.⁸ The energy sector presents a structurally analogous opportunity, better regulated, better capitalised, and with a clearer legislative framework and even fiscal policy than existed in the telecommunications sector in 2001.

2.2 South Africa: Technological Strength in Search of Energy Supply

South Africa operates from a position of energy deficit but counterbalanced by technological strength. The government has secured approximately $13 billion toward its energy transition, with a renewable energy target of 60 gigawatts by 2030. Natural gas has been designated a central pillar of the transition strategy. Two LNG import terminal projects, at Richards Bay and Ngqura, are targeting operations from approximately 2027, the precise window in which Nigeria-sourced LNG supply is likely to become commercially available.

On the upstream regulatory front, the Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act 23 of 2024 (UPRDA),⁹ assented to by the South African President on 25^th October 2024, separates the petroleum regulatory framework from the broader mining sector, addressing long-standing investor criticism that the operative framework of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act 2002 (MPRDA)¹⁰ was insufficiently tailored to the petroleum industry's specific requirements. At its core, the UPRDA 2024 combines exploration and production rights into a single petroleum right, sets out controlled licensing rounds, guarantees third-party access to infrastructure, and establishes the Petroleum Agency of South Africa as a clear regulatory authority. The objects of the Act include promoting technology transfer and skills development, expanding opportunities for black persons in the upstream sector, and advancing social and economic welfare. However, the regulations needed to put the Act into practice are still being finalised, and until these rules are published and tested in early rounds, investor confidence is likely to remain cautious.

The commercial alignment between the two nations is almost textbook: Nigeria has the gas; South Africa has the technology, the institutional framework, and the import infrastructure under construction. This exchange of complementary strategic assets cannot be accomplished through commodity offtake agreements alone, it requires proper legal and institutional frameworks, and it is to the architecture of those frameworks that the bulk of this paper is directed.

3. THE CENTRALITY OF TRADE SECRETS IN ENERGY INVESTMENT

The architecture of contemporary energy investment has evolved far beyond its traditional foundations in resource endowment and capital deployment. Licensing and investment decisions are now influenced as much by access to technological capabilities and data intelligence as by the availability of natural reserves themselves. In the energy sector, trade secrets are frequently not peripheral to investment value, they are at the core of the investment. The capital deployed in building a terminal or drilling a well is the visible component; the proprietary knowledge that makes that capital productive is often worth as much as if not more than the physical infrastructure itself.

Under the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) framework, trade secrets are intellectual property rights in confidential information that may be sold or licensed. Three conditions must be met before an enforceable right crystalises; the information must be commercially valuable, it must not be in the public domain, and the holder must have taken reasonable steps to preserve its secrecy. Unlike patents, which offer time-limited monopoly rights in exchange for public disclosure, trade secrets provide protection of unlimited duration without any disclosure requirement. The trade-off is vulnerability: once disclosed publicly, the protection is irretrievably lost.

3.1 Upstream Operations: Where Trade Secrets Are First Deployed

An orderly account begins at the upstream segment, the foundational phase of the energy value chain, where hydrocarbons are identified, extracted, and brought into production.¹¹ Significant capital is deployed here into geological and geophysical surveying, seismic data acquisition, reservoir modelling, and oil well design.¹² The upstream sector has undergone profound technological transformation: advances including AI-assisted geological data interpretation, directional drilling, and enhanced seismic imaging have shifted value creation increasingly towards the generation and strategic deployment of high-quality subsurface data.¹³ These innovations qualify as trade secrets in the legal sense, and their protection determines whether sophisticated foreign investors regard a jurisdiction as safe for technology-intensive investment.

In Nigeria, the licensing process governed by the PIA 2021 is the primary arena where trade secrets and the law interact most acutely.¹⁴ The competitive bidding process, spanning pre-qualification, technical bid submission, evaluation, and commercial bid conference will require bidders to incrementally disclose volumes of proprietary information, geological interpretations, exploration strategies, well optimisation practices, development plans, and highly guarded financial models.¹⁵ Such information, where it is not generally known or readily accessible, falls within the scope of protectable trade secrets under the TRIPS Agreement.¹⁶ At every stage, the risk of misappropriation, through insider leaks, cyber intrusion, or regulatory lapses, poses a direct threat to the bidder's competitive position. The NUPRC also imposes strict confidentiality obligations on all participants in the bidding process, but these sector-specific protections do not substitute for a comprehensive trade secrets statute of general application.

A parallel concern arises with recent IOC divestments. As Shell, ExxonMobil, and Eni continue to exit Nigerian onshore assets, decades of accumulated seismic, drilling, and production data become deeply contested. Such data, some of the most commercially sensitive trade secrets in Nigeria's upstream sector, raises questions of ownership, transfer, and successor /operator access rights that Nigerian law is currently poorly equipped to resolve. South Africa, as a potential technology partner would inevitably seek access to Nigerian reservoir data, making this data ownership question a prerequisite that must be resolved before any meaningful technical collaboration can be structured.

In South Africa, the MPRDA's administrative, and application-based licensing process has historically required applicants to submit detailed technical and financial information, geological and geophysical data, work programmes, financial capability evidence, much of which is inherently proprietary.¹⁷ The UPRDA's¹⁸ introduction of formal competitive licensing rounds reinforces this concern, generating an environment in which significant volumes of confidential business information may be disclosed in the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework for their protection.¹⁹

3.2 The Downstream Dimension

The imperative to protect trade secrets is equally pronounced in the downstream sector, where the intensity of commercial competition heightens the risks of unauthorised disclosure. This extends from proprietary technologies in the optimised design and management of pipeline systems, including leak detection systems, to commercially valuable practices in refining, pricing architecture, supply chain coordination, and distribution management.²⁰

3.3 Sasol and Eskom: Africa's Most Strategically Significant Proprietary Know-how

Two specific South African trade secret assets can define the stakes of bilateral investment cooperation with Nigeria.

The first is Sasol's Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) technology, built on the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis process that Sasol has spent decades refining into a proprietary industrial capability commercially deployed at the Oryx GTL plant in Qatar. The commercial implications for Nigeria are profound: enormous volumes of associated gas currently flared in the Niger Delta could, under a GTL processing framework, be converted into high-value synthetic fuels commanding premium pricing in environmental-compliance markets. A Sasol-NNPC GTL collaboration would be transformative, but the negotiation of such a partnership immediately confronts the trade secrets question in its most acute form. What aspects of the Fischer-Tropsch process are patented and which ones are protected via trade secret? What know-how would Sasol be willing to license, and on what royalty terms? What prevents licensed technology from being reverse-engineered after cooperation terminates? These are not hypothetical challenges; they form part of the questions that have blocked GTL partnership discussions in West Africa for years and resolving them requires legal frameworks that neither country has yet fully developed.

The second is Eskom's grid management expertise, over a century of operational knowledge in managing one of the world's largest integrated power grids, including dispatch protocols, fault detection systems, and demand forecasting methodologies. These constitute a body of operational trade secrets of enormous value to Nigeria's power sector, which despite approximately 13,625 MW of installed generation capacity can only muster around 5,339 MW due to transmission constraints and governance challenges across the value-chain. A technical knowledge transfer programme from Eskom to Nigeria's Transmission Company would be of high-value but this must be preceded by a three-way classification exercise: what is generic engineering knowledge freely shareable; what is Eskom's proprietary institutional methodology requiring licensing; and what is third-party technology that Eskom itself uses under licence and cannot sublicence without the original licensor's consent. This exercise requires sophisticated legal advice that the current bilateral institutional framework is not yet equipped to provide.

4. THE LEGAL FRAMEWORKS — PROTECTION, GAPS, AND THE CASE FOR CONVERGENCE

4.1 South Africa's Common Law Architecture

South Africa's trade secret protection framework is sophisticated but fundamentally common-law based, derived from judicial precedent through the principle of unlawful competition. The foundational case of Dun and Bradstreet (Pty) Ltd v SA Merchants Combined Credit Bureau (Cape) (Pty) Ltd.,²¹ established that the unauthorised appropriation of proprietary commercial information constitutes actionable dishonest misappropriation, a principle consistently applied and expanded by South African courts. Practical protection relies on contractual architecture: Non-Disclosure Agreements, employment confidentiality clauses, and post-employment restraints of trade. The Cybercrimes Act No. 19 of 2020²² adds criminal sanctions for digital theft of confidential commercial data, increasingly material as energy management systems are digitalised. The limitation is the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework, which creates uncertainty for foreign investors unfamiliar with common law protections or variable judicial pronouncements.

4.2 Nigeria's Evolving Landscape — and Its Critical Gap

Nigeria currently has no dedicated trade secrets legislation. Protection is addressed through a fragmented combination of common law on breach of confidence, general contract law, and sector-specific confidentiality provisions in joint operating agreements.²³ This constitutes a structural gap that actively deters technology-intensive investment in Nigeria.

The most significant recent policy development in Nigeria is the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS),²⁴ approved by the Federal Executive Council on 6^th November 2025 as Nigeria's first unified national framework for IP protection, commercialisation, and governance. The policy aims to strengthen legal and institutional frameworks for IP administration, enhance enforcement mechanisms, and promote technology transfer and commercialisation. The NIPPS also recommends the introduction of a national trade secrets law in its implementation plan. In January 2026, the Federal Government inaugurated specialised implementation committees, an Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee and an Inter-Agency Coordination Group, tasked with coordinated action across government agencies and alignment with Nigeria's obligations under the AfCFTA Intellectual Property Protocol. The policy mandates the establishment of a special industrial property tribunal to act as a quasi-judicial fast track disputes resolution process, bypassing congested courts to settle technical disputes.

Nigeria's TRIPS Agreement obligations as a WTO member provide minimum standards for trade secrets protection through Article 39, which requires protection of undisclosed information from acquisition or disclosure contrary to honest commercial practice. In an energy sector where the commercial value of proprietary know-how can run into hundreds of millions of dollars, TRIPS minimums are wholly insufficient to support the depth of technology transfer that a Nigeria-South Africa partnership requires.

4.3 Towards a Bilateral Framework between Nigeria and South Africa

Although there is presently no formalised bilateral energy data regime or legal framework in either jurisdiction, an observable pattern of independent yet functionally convergent regulatory development has emerged. Both countries have, within a few years of each other, enacted foundational legislative reforms across their energy sectors, Nigeria through the PIA 2021, the Electricity Act 2023, and the NERC Mini-Grid Regulations 2026; South Africa through the UPRDA 2024. Both are simultaneously engaged in IP reform, Nigeria through NIPPS 2025/2026, South Africa through the continuing evolution of its common law framework. The Riverside LNG negotiations, in which a Nigerian LNG supplier is in advanced discussions to supply natural gas to South Africa in the exact window that its import terminals become operational, demonstrate that market actors have already independently identified the commercial logic of this bilateral relationship. The role of policy and the law is not to re-create this relationship from scratch, but to formalise, protect, and scale what those market actors have already set in motion.

Both nations face parallel challenges in terms of protecting sensitive energy-related data and providing legal certainty for technology-driven investment models. These shared pressures provide the rational foundation for a coordinated legal approach, at minimum, model principles or a framework agreement on IP cooperation in the energy sector, to be deepened as bilateral investment confidence grows. The central idea is that an emerging convergence, driven by technological transformation, justifies serious policy consideration of a bilateral legal relationship, even initially at the level of soft harmonisation.

5. STRUCTURAL RISKS OF INADEQUATE TRADE SECRETS PROTECTION

Before turning to recommendations, it is necessary to name the concrete consequences of inaction.

5.1 The Technology Licensing Discount: - When a technology-owning company assesses the risk of licensing proprietary know-how in a jurisdiction with weak trade secret protection, it applies a licensing discount, reducing the scale or quality of technology made available, or increasing royalty rates to compensate for misappropriation risk. In practice, the most current and commercially significant proprietary technology is withheld entirely from high-risk jurisdictions. Consequently, technology transferred under such circumstances is typically older and less valuable, a direct drag on industrial productivity that dwarfs most conventional investment barriers.

5.2 The Joint Venture Structuring Problem: - When one partner contributes proprietary technology as its equity contribution, the operating agreement must specify with precision: what exactly is being contributed; what access rights the other partner has; what happens to improvements made during the venture; and what post-termination use rights the non-contributing partner retains. Where trade secret law is underdeveloped or non-existent, each transaction requires bespoke legal architecture at enormous cost and extended timelines, making many commercially promising partnerships economically unviable when transaction costs are factored in.

5.3 Employee Mobility and Knowledge Migration: - Trade secrets most commonly migrate between organisations through employee mobility, the routine movement of skilled professionals between employers, rather than through corporate espionage. In Nigeria's oil and gas sector, talent flows routinely between IOCs, NNPC, and indigenous E&P companies. South Africa's jurisprudence on restraints of trade, while subject to constitutional scrutiny, apparently provides a more developed framework for limiting this risk than Nigerian law currently does. Harmonising the approach to post-employment trade secret protection is a necessary component of any bilateral IP cooperation framework.

6. STRATEGIC RECOMMENDATIONS

6.1 Negotiate a Bilateral Energy Investment and IP Treaty: - Both governments must move beyond Memoranda of Understanding to establishing a formal Bilateral Energy Investment Treaty with dedicated provisions on trade secrets recognition, technology transfer governance, joint venture IP ownership, and expedited dispute resolution mechanism, driven at the highest levels of both governments with substantive IP and energy sector legal expertise on both sides.

6.2 Designate a Nigeria-South Africa Gas-to-Power Corridor as a Flagship Initiative: - Building on the Riverside LNG negotiations, both governments should formally designate a Gas-to-Power Corridor as a priority bilateral infrastructure project, underpinned by long-term take-or-pay off-take agreements of at least 20 years, the only tenure capable of de-risking the infrastructure investments on both sides sufficiently to attract institutional financing. This corridor should incorporate a structured technology-for-gas exchange, in which Sasol's GTL and gas management expertise is licensed to Nigerian operators in exchange for preferential supply terms.

6.3 Establish a Joint IP Holding Entity: - for collaborations involving high-value South African energy IP, both countries should establish a Joint IP Holding Entity, a special purpose vehicle incorporated in a neutral jurisdiction with strong IP enforcement, that holds cross-licensed proprietary technology, receives shared royalty streams, and serves as the institutional repository for accumulated joint proprietary know-how.

6.4 Accelerate Nigeria's Trade Secrets Legislative Reform: - Nigeria must treat the enactment of a dedicated trade secrets legislation as a priority commercial law reform project. The NIPPS mandate provides the policy authorisation, and what is now required is political commitment to accelerate the legislative timeline. The statute must meet international best practice standards, provide clear definitions of protectable information, statutory civil and criminal remedies, in-camera hearing options for IP litigation, contain provisions on employee mobility and post-employment trade secret use, and cross-border recognition provisions that facilitate enforcement of protections established under partner states' laws. The proposed Industrial Property Tribunal must enter into operation simultaneously with the new legislation. A specialist judicial forum and a substantive statute are only effective in combination.

6.5 Leverage the Subnational Electricity Framework for Entry-Level Bilateral Investment: -the NERC Mini-Grid Regulations 2026 and the subnational electricity legislation enacted by sixteen Nigerian states represent entry points for South African investors at a sub-sovereign level and is less capital-intensive, faster to deploy, and capable of demonstrating bankable models before full-scale investment commitments are made. The lesson of MTN, that patient, early-entry South African capital in a reforming Nigerian commercial sector generates transformative returns, applies here with equal force.

7. CONCLUSION

The repositioning of energy investment between South Africa and Nigeria does not require persuading either nation of the opportunity's existence. Both governments, both national energy companies, and the leading private sector actors in both countries already recognise what is available. What has been lacking is the specific legal and institutional architecture that converts that recognition into bankable, executable, and durable investment relationships.

Trade secrets, the proprietary know-how, intellectual property assets, and technical intelligence that underpin energy sector value creation, are the central determinant of whether cross-border energy partnerships generate their full potential value or consistently fall short. Sasol's GTL technology, NNPC's reservoir intelligence, Eskom's grid management expertise, and operational know-how are all forms of intellectual capital that are commercially transferable, legally protectable, and strategically transformative, but only within frameworks that protect their proprietary character and ensure that the value they generate is fairly shared between contributing parties.

The commercial logic is undeniable. The legislative momentum in both countries is real and accelerating. The infrastructure timelines are synchronised. The bilateral commercial initiatives are already in motion. What this moment demands is the institutional courage to build the legal and governance architecture that will allow that logic to be fully realised, protecting what is proprietary, sharing what advances mutual interest, and structuring, with rigour and good faith, an energy relationship worthy of the two great nations it would serve.

Footnotes

1. Amy Kapczynski (2021), 'The public history of trade secrets' Davis L. Rev., 55, pp. 1367-1443: 1367.

2. This was exemplified in the famous decisions in Vickery v. Welch 36 Mass. 523 (1837) and Peabody v. Norfolk 98 Mass. 452 (1868) where the court held that a manufacturing process invented or discovered by a person is enforceable as a non-exclusive proprietary right. One thing is evident; the recognition of trade secret continues to mature globally.

3. Colin L. Powell (2002), Remarks at Sovereign Credit Rating Conference, (https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/9634.htm) accessed 21 April 2026.

4. Pessach, G. (2016), 'Beyond IP-The Cost of Free: Informational Capitalism in a Post-IP Era, Osgoode Hall LJ, 54, 225. See also, Kapczynski, A. (2022) 'The public history of trade secrets', UC Davis Law Review, 55, 1367, where the author at page 1370 opines that: "It is a commonplace that we today live in an age of "informational capitalism," where the developmental force that determines productivity lies very substantially in the processing and exchange of information and data".

5. Petroleum Industry Act, 2021 (Act No. 6, Gazette No. 142, Vol. 108).

6. Electricity Act, 2023 (Act No. 12, Gazette No. 103, Vol. 110).

7. NERC Mini-Grid Regulations, 2026 (Regulation No: NERC-R-001-2026), made pursuant to the Electricity Act, 2023.

8. See, 'Nigeria emerges as MTN's dominant market after massive earnings jump' available at (https://techcabal.com/2026/03/16/nigeria-becomes-mtns-biggest-profit-driver/) accessed on 27 February 2026.

9. Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act, 2024 (Act No. 23 of 2024) (Government Gazette No. 51463, Vol. 712).

10. Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, 2002 (Act No. 28 of 2002) (Government Gazette No. 23922, Vol. 448).

11. Candeias, T. D. J. (2024), A comprehensive overview and classification of upstream oil and gas contracts, available at (https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/121849/1/MPRA_paper_121849.pdf) accessed on 18th April 2026.

12. Ibid.

13. Ochulor, O. J., Sofoluwe, O. O., Ukato, A. & Jambol, D. D. (2024), 'Technological advancements in drilling: A comparative analysis of onshore and offshore applications', World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, 22(1), pp. 602-611.

14. Section 74, Petroleum Industry Act, 2021.

15. NUPRC. Nigeria 2025 licensing round portal, available at: (https://br2025.nuprc.gov.ng/) accessed on April 17, 2026.

16. World Trade Organisation's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, article 39 TRIPS Agreement 1995, Annex 1C WTO Agreement, 1869 U.N.T.S. 299.

17. See, Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, ss 3, 79–84 (vesting custodianship in the State and providing for applications for reconnaissance permits, exploration and production rights). See also, David Forfar, 'Upstream Oil and Gas Authorisation in South Africa' (Bowmans, 2017). See, Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr, 'Oil and Gas Regulation in South Africa: Overview' (Lexology, 2024), noting the administrative and, in certain instances, first-come-first-served nature of applications under the MPRDA framework.

18. It should be noted that the Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act 23 of 2024 separates oil and gas regulation from mining to encourage investment, offering a "petroleum right" that combines exploration and production. It mandates state participation and local content. While the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) remains partially in force, the UPRDA replaces its petroleum-specific provisions.

19. See, Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act 2024, provisions introducing competitive and ministerially initiated licensing rounds.

20. See, Zhang, J., & Twomey, M. Statistical pipeline leak detection techniques for all operating conditions. Paper presented at the 26th Environmental Symposium & Exhibition, California, United States, 2000, March 27–30.

21. Dun and Bradstreet (Pty) Ltd v SA Merchants Combined Credit Bureau (Cape) (Pty) Ltd 1968 (1) SA 209 (C).

22. Section 3(1) of the Cybercrimes Act, 2020 (Act No. 19 of 2020) (Government Gazette No. 44651, Vol. 672).

23. See, Andreas Koumoulis v. Leventis Motors Ltd. [1973] NSCC 557 (holding that non-compete clauses could be enforced where such clauses are reasonable in terms of duration and geographical limits); Aprofin Engineering Ltd. v. Bigouret & Anor. (2015) 52 N.L.L.R. (Part 173) 1 CA (where the Court of Appeal nullified a 6-month restrictive covenant for conflicting with the provisions of section 17(3)(a) and (e) of the 1999 Constitution, and La Casera Company Plc. v. Prahlad Kottapurath Gangadaran (unreported Appeal No. CA/1059/2016, where the Court of Appeal upheld a 5-year restrictive covenant whilst invalidating a perpetual restriction on the employee's ability to earn a living.

24. Federal Republic of Nigeria, National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS) (approved by the Federal Executive Council on 6 November 2025).

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.