Who is in charge of regulating South Africa’s air quality?

Thuli Khumalo is South Africa’s chief air quality officer. She works for the national environment department, which is often sidelined by the drive to “cut red tape” and the rush to grow extractive industries.

She walks around with a small see-through folder in which is a worn copy of the Constitution and a tattered environmental law book. The latter is what gives her the authority to look after the country’s air. It gets used so often that the pages are falling out.

The Air Quality Act allows her to set acceptable levels of different pollutants. Companies have to apply for permission to pollute.

But the law is deliberately crafted to weaken her hand.

She says: “The regulations allow us to take ‘reasonable’ measures to control air pollution.”

That one word — reasonable — is crucial. In practice, it means the department can only gradually change air quality laws, slowly improving on apartheid levels where people of colour were deliberately placed downwind of toxic industrial facilities.

It also means the law must balance the pushback of other government departments, companies and stateowned entities. This is why, when new air quality legislation came into effect in 2015, virtually all big polluters, including Eskom, Sasol and Arcelormittal, applied for exemptions to the law — and got them.

These exemptions are granted by district authorities, not Khumalo.

Her unit also has limited means of getting people to obey the law.

If a company pollutes, she needs the environment department’s enforcement officials, the Green Scorpions, to investigate and then hand the case over to the National Prosecuting Authority. The person tasked with looking after the air everyone breathes has very little real power beyond setting the limits of pollution and asking people to stick to those limits.

This means that it’s often down to individuals to call in enforcement officials. Khumalo says it’s something she does all the time, even when out and about with her children — it’s a habit that makes her son furious at polluters.

“He’ll shout: ‘Why are you doing this?’ and say: ‘My mom needs to knock off’.’ ”

Khumalo says things are changing, and companies are fixing their pollution. But she is quick to open the South African Air Quality Information System app and stare at stations reporting polluted air, saying: “This is still a huge problem”.

She says fixing air takes decades — as it did in European countries. But, once that pollution is better, she says a “radical shift” will be needed in how everyone tackles air pollution.

“We have a blame culture in

South Africa. You want to lay the blame with the polluter. We take very little time to say: ‘When I drove to the office what contribution did I make?’ You are also adding to the problem that is affecting you.” — Sipho Kings