Fresh blow to Joburg’s vulnerable neurodiverse kids in battle with City, province over unpaid bills

The City of Johannesburg has once again served the Children’s Memorial Institute (CMI) with termination notices for electricity and water. Last week the CMI board was summoned to a meeting with City treasury officials, ostensibly to “resolve the issue” – and spent most of the hour being berated for “not paying”. We reminded them that we are neither the property owner (Gauteng Infrastructure and Development) nor the account holder (the Gauteng Department of Health), and that we have repeatedly asked for our own account and individual meters so we could start contributing to utilities. The chair confirmed, again, that we would get neither an account nor meters – but must pay anyway.

The CMI was constituted in 2013 as an NPC to manage this campus, home to the original Transvaal Memorial Institute (TMI) hospital – now nearly 104 years old – and a 1960s extension. It also houses the Gauteng Department of Health’s Laundry, which services five hospitals and 13 clinics across greater Johannesburg, the largest being Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital (CMJAH). When CMJAH (then Johannesburg General Hospital) was built in the late 1970s, most hospital units moved to the new building, leaving behind child psychiatry, physiotherapy and the hospital school. The head of paediatrics at the time, Professor Lorna Jacklin, was among the first doctors to recognise that children with severe disabilities – cerebral palsy, autism – could still be deeply engaged with the world. Today the CMI is home to the Johannesburg School 4 Autism, with more than 365 autistic learners, and 22 NGOs committed to its stated aim as an NPC: “Unlocking the potential of special needs, at risk, children so contributing to their meaningful life.”

The NGOs range from Afrika Tikkun’s Uthando Centre, which supports more than 700 children aged five to 18 daily, to smaller organisations offering places of safety, rights advocacy and special needs support. Some are among the oldest in Johannesburg: the Johannesburg Parent & Child Counselling Centre has served the city’s families since 1944; the African Child Feeding Scheme, founded in 1945, coordinates feeding for more than 13,000 children daily; and Gauteng Childline has provided emergency child protection to more than 800 children daily since 1986. The Teddy Bear Foundation and Clinic has reshaped how our care system responds to abuse, while Fight with Insight and Lefika La Phodiso offer support through boxing, physical education and the creative arts.

I joined the CMI community in October 2023, launching the Sensory-Space for the institution’s 100th birthday, shortly after completing doctoral research into the lived experience of neurodiverse children – who face challenges spanning learning disabilities, developmental delays, physical disabilities, behavioural difficulties, hypermobility, ADHD and, for many, autism. The space is free to all children in aftercare, therapy or support at the CMI and the Autism School, and to children in the city’s baby and children’s homes, where sensory therapy has proved effective in helping children move trauma through their bodies. Autism School children attended daily through 2024 and 2025, with astonishing results: children who had never spoken said their first words; children who struggled socially began making eye contact and initiating engagement. Watching what we called “moments of joy” – children’s faces lighting up as they entered the space – was the most powerful part. As one young adult from the school’s Vocational Training Phase put it: “This is our space, it was made especially for us.”

At the end of April 2024, despite having just signed a new agreement for increased space, the Autism School’s principal informed the board that the school would no longer pay its share of cleaning, maintenance and security – a serious blow, since the school occupies nearly half the CMI’s rented floor space. The board chair and I then met a delegation from the Gauteng Department of Education, who told us they no longer recognised our “authority” as building managers because we had no lease with the Department of Infrastructure and Development. Yet the CMI’s agreement had always been with the Department of Health – the City’s account holder, which had paid all utilities since the CMI’s 2013 incorporation – in exchange for the CMI managing, maintaining and securing the property, funded by NGO and school levies.

Shocked, we secured pro bono support from property experts Vermaak, Marshall & Wellbeloved, who produced a legal opinion on our tenure and sent it to the Gauteng departments of Infrastructure and Development (GDID), Education and Health. GDID’s legal team said they wanted us to continue managing and securing the property, but we needed a lease. A GDID representative arrived in November 2024 to measure each NGO’s space, giving us two weeks to apply – or be thrown out, dismissed as “no better than building hijackers”. In an administrative sprint, we gathered the required legal documents, bank statements and tax clearances, and submitted lease applications for 23 NGOs to GDID on 15 November 2024.

Meanwhile, the City had begun switching off our water and electricity intermittently, each time for a few days before restoring it. We eventually discovered that the Department of Health, via CMJAH’s administrators, had not paid for electricity or water since September 2019 – despite the CMI’s NGOs and the Autism School closing for most of the 2020-2021 Covid lockdowns, while the laundry ran at full capacity throughout the pandemic.

Throughout, we kept trying to engage government stakeholders – the Autism School hadn’t paid us in over a year, and our R1.5-million savings were exhausted. In September 2024 our building manager of 15 years resigned; unable to afford a replacement, I took on the role pro bono for the board. Then, in June 2025, the City disconnected our water entirely. We discovered that while most of the building drew from a meter at the bottom of the property, a second, older inlet still fed the upper part of the building – and the CMJAH Laundry had quietly connected itself to this inlet via its ring-feed system to keep operating. Left without water, we had to close both the Autism School and our NGO support system, and took the matter to court. With SECTION27’s help, we won a high court ruling ordering the City to reconnect our water and instructing GDID and the Department of Health to conduct a “debatement of accounts”. The court gave GDID 14 days to file an affidavit detailing how it would resolve the issue. To my knowledge, that affidavit was never filed – GDID is effectively in contempt of court.

Following further meetings, the City quickly metered the inlet the laundry had tapped into. In March this year, GDID’s engineers recorded baseline readings of more than 300 kilolitres a day from the laundry’s meter, against just 12kL a day from the older meter serving only the school and NGOs – meaning the laundry was using more than 90% of the campus’s water.

With water restored, the City switched off our electricity in December 2025 – the Department of Health, it emerged, now owed more than R70-million for water and electricity. We returned to court, this time with pro bono support from HBG Schindlers, and again won: the court ordered electricity restored, ruling the City had given no warning despite knowing how vulnerable our beneficiaries were. Despite weekly emails to our intergovernmental relations stakeholders across Infrastructure and Development, Health and Education, we remained unpaid for security, cleaning and maintenance – services we couldn’t simply stop without compromising the children’s safety.

Late in 2025 we sent the Autism School a letter of demand for money owed – now nearly R3-million. Rather than resolve it, the principal banned all learners from the Sensory-Space. Relations have since deteriorated further, with teachers openly hostile to CMI staff and flouting community rules; I’ve been told teachers were advised to ignore our rules since we have no lease. GDID, despite receiving our applications in November 2024 and confirming in writing that we should keep managing and securing the campus, still hasn’t issued a single lease. The Autism School’s space is visibly deteriorating, with rising incidents of problematic learner behaviour – including vandalism and assault – due to a lack of supervision. Formal letters to the Gauteng education MEC, the Education Portfolio Committee, the school governing body and the principal, and hundreds of daily messages have gone unanswered.

Despite all this, the CMI’s NGOs keep finding ways to support the children we serve. Over the June holidays, our team turned the Autism School’s playground into a Sensory Garden – if children couldn’t come to the therapy, we’d bring the therapy to them. Last week, facilitators introduced the children to their new garden: instead of kicking stones around a dusty concrete court, they played with new soccer balls on freshly turfed ground, and explored sensory installations designed around texture, colour, smell, sound and adventurous play.

We are now waiting for the next switch-off, which the City has assured us is coming soon – at which point we will again have to close this community of care while government departments argue over our future. Johannesburg’s vulnerable, disabled and neurodiverse children deserve better. DM