Sandisiwe Ncemane

Sandisiwe Ncemane is a General Manager at the Central Energy Fund (CEF), South Africa’s state-owned diversified energy group, which manages the government’s oil and gas assets. A professionally registered engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA), she has worked across broadcasting and energy for about two decades. At CEF she has been acting General Manager for Gas Commercialisation and Aggregation (2024) and, by 2025, General Manager for Market and Business Analysis. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Africa Energy Technology Centre (AETC).

Her early career was in broadcasting engineering, with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and Telkom Media. She moved into energy at the Coega Development Corporation (CDC) in the Eastern Cape, where she was Business Development Manager for the energy sector and worked with other entities preparing for South Africa’s planned new nuclear build programme, with a focus on nuclear localisation. Ncemane was deputy president of the Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa (NIASA) and became its acting president in 2017, the year she was also a finalist for Woman in Power/Water at the African Utility Week Industry Awards.

In 2022 she was seconded from CEF to PetroSA, the national oil company, as acting Chief Operating Officer and went on to act as its Group Chief Executive Officer, with a board mandate to turn the company around and put it on a growth path that supports South Africa’s security of energy supply. CEF named PetroSA its ‘Most Improved Subsidiary’ in 2023 after it reported a R1.4 billion profit for 2022/2023. She returned to CEF in February 2024, when PetroSA appointed a new acting chief executive.

Ncemane holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cape Town and an MSc (Eng) in Engineering Management from the University of Pretoria, and has studied with the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at the University of South Africa. She has also studied towards a master’s degree in African energy leadership at Wits Business School. She has argued that gas has a strategic role in South Africa’s energy mix, drawing on offshore reserves, imported liquefied natural gas and pipeline gas from Mozambique. At AETC 2026 she urged that clean cooking be treated not only as a poverty issue but as an energy service that is sustainable, accessible and affordable, and meaningful for the entrepreneurs who take part in it.