The Gauteng government and City of Joburg's neglect of vulnerable, disabled and neurodiverse children has left NGOs to pick up the pieces of a once-thriving community of care at the Children's Memorial Institute.

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...