Joburg’s Children’s Memorial Institute faces dark times as electricity is cut over unpaid bills

The lights have gone out at the Children’s Memorial Institute (CMI) after City Power cut the power to the Braamfontein campus that houses 20 NGOs that provide for the city’s most vulnerable special needs children.

This crisis comes in the wake of a staggering R41-million bill that the City of Joburg says it is owed. The CMI, as the umbrella entity for the NGOs and NPOs on site, is not the account holder – the Gauteng Department of Health is.

The department runs its laundries for the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital on the campus. This makes it the primary consumer of water and electricity on the site. But the dispute between City Power and the department over unpaid bills has dragged on for years.

While the department has been able to buy diesel to run its generators following the power cut, the NGOs don’t have the luxury of huge reserve funds and have been forced to slash services.

This latest fiasco follows a similar dispute over outstanding water bills and three provincial departments – health, education and infrastructure and development – with overlapping responsibilities at the Braamfontein campus seemingly shirking from paying their mounting bills or taking meaningful action to find a resolution.

Read more: Gauteng special needs children’s NGOs face closure amid deadlock with state over unpaid bills

At the time, in July this year, the CMI was forced to take the matter to court with representation from SECTION27, the public interest litigation and social justice organisation. It took a high court order granted on 16 July to have their water turned on again. A water bill of more than R2.5-million remains outstanding.

The court order also set out that all parties had to engage meaningfully to resolve the matter. But after an initial series of meetings and a to-and-fro of emails, communication petered out by this October.

Then, on 19 November, without warning, a City Power contractor arrived at the campus and turned off the power, according to Dr Dee Blackie. Blackie is a CMI board member and also founder and director of the Sensory Space, based at the CMI. It’s a service that supports neurodiverse children.

Blackie says: “We had to spend over R30,000 in that first week for diesel that came from our emergency funds. As a result we had to scale back on all non-essential services. But this is happening during 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence and it’s a time when Childline [based at the CMI] fields an extremely high volume of calls.”

Other work by the NGOs based there includes coordinating children’s food and nutrition schemes across the country, finding emergency safe houses for abandoned babies and children, and emergency counselling for traumatised and abused children. Other NGOs based there include The Teddy Bear Clinic.

The CMI headed back to court on Tuesday (2 December) with an urgent application for the courts to compel the City of Johannesburg to turn on the lights, so that the children who rely on the services are not the casualties as two giant bureaucracies bump heads.

Chantelle Gladwin-Wood, partner at HBG Schindlers Attorneys, who have taken on the case pro bono, says they will ask the courts to have power restored immediately on the grounds that City Power failed to give 14 days’ notice to the tenants and occupants. By law they should have also given fair opportunity for representation to the City of Johannesburg before services were cut.

Gladwin-Wood says that beyond the failure to compel with procedures for cutting off electricity, they will ask the high court, as the upper guardian of children, to make a ruling in the interest of the children and to protect the more than 1,000 who are on site each day who are now unable to access the special needs services they require.

Gladwin-Wood points out that the case cannot be dealt with as the “average municipality and government departments being bull-headed case” because children are involved and because the amounts are “absolutely enormous”. As such, she says, the respondents need to express how they intend to move forward towards a resolution. She said this could include intervention from the likes of Treasury or the National Energy Regulator of South Africa.

“We are asking for the court to give us an interdict, which means an order that they can’t cut us off again until something happens. And that ‘something happens’ must be informed by other parties telling their side of the story to the court and saying how they see their obligations and a way forward,” she says.

Gladwin-Wood adds: “We need to have the right motives and the right engagements so that the CMI can make whatever arrangements it needs to, to not be caught in the middle. We are in a situation where the children are being treated most unequally and with indignity because officials cannot sort this out amongst themselves – the children don’t deserve to suffer.”

The CMI has for years asked for the installation of separate water and electricity metering and prepaid metering so that individual tenants on the campus can pay their dues separately. The installations only started happening after the July court order, but separate billing will not begin until the outstanding amounts are settled, Blackie says is what they’ve been told. It leaves them in the same limbo.

The future of the CMI at its current site remains precarious. Its existence as a hub of children’s services and its location on the edge of the inner city are important to be where vulnerable children can best access services, including as walk-in clients.

The institute was formally set up as a collective of children’s NGOs and NPOs in 2013, though many of these organisations have been tenants on site for decades.

As a collective they entered into a memorandum of agreement which allowed the CMI to use the Gauteng Department of Infrastructure and Development buildings. In turn they paid for the upkeep of the buildings and office spaces. Their responsibilities have included cleaning, gardening, maintenance and security services. The payment for water and electricity and the maintenance of lifts would be covered by Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital.

An additional ongoing dispute that leaves the future of the CMI in deeper crisis arose in April 2024 when the Gauteng Department of Education, which oversees the School of Autism on the campus, stopped paying its contributions to the CMI. The school has more than 1,000 children and occupies 70% of the campus. But its non-payments over 20 months has resulted in R100,000-a-month deficits to the CMI. Blackie says they CMI has had to instituted separate legal action to recover about R2-million.

The Gauteng Department of Health did not answer Daily Maverick’s questions but forwarded its press statement from 21 November, which stated: “The Department can confirm that all invoices received from the City of Johannesburg for facilities under its responsibility have been processed and paid to date. However, any invoice linked to the Children’s Memorial Institute is currently under review due to irregularities identified in the billing system.”

But it confirmed: “Historically, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital has been responsible for managing CMI’s utility payments including those for water and electricity.”

The department did not comment on the estimated R15,000-a-day diesel bill to run its laundry, only saying that the “CMI [has been forced] to rely on generators which is not sustainable in the long term”.

It is a respondent to the 2 December court matter but said in the statement it “will continue engaging with City Power and the City of Johannesburg to resolve these pressing issues as swiftly as possible”. DM