Gauteng Government Scrambles to Meet Drug Rehab Targets

After pulling funding from almost half of Gauteng’s beds in state-funded drug rehabs last year, the provincial Department of Social Development is under pressure to get the programme up and running again.

• Last year, the Gauteng Department of Social Development withheld funding from nearly half of its drug rehab beds due to baseless findings made by a flawed forensic audit.
• Most organisations have since been cleared and have had their funding reinstated.
• But as a result of the funding cuts, the department performed dismally on its treatment targets.

After pulling funding from almost half of Gauteng’s beds in state-funded drug rehabs last year, the provincial Department of Social Development is under pressure to get the programme up and running again.

In 2023, the department funded about 570 beds at inpatient drug rehab centres run by non-profit organisations. But last year, it defunded at least 246 beds based on the findings of a flawed forensic audit.

An additional 750 department-funded beds were lost when two large rehab centres in Witpoort and Randfontein, run by Life Healthcare, shut down in July 2024. GroundUp previously reported how infamous Life Esidimeni psychiatric care facilities were converted to drug rehab centres in 2016. The decision to fund these centres was pushed through by the department, despite not having enough money to sustain them in the long term. The department therefore stopped funding the centres.

Unfunded non-profit rehabs had to downscale, and some closed their doors. Later, the department cleared almost all of the organisations of wrongdoing, but Life Healthcare’s centres have remained closed.

As a result, the department underperformed on its targets for the year. In the first three months of the year, only 149 people were treated in its funded drug rehab centres. By the end of the third quarter, as more rehab centres had their funding reinstated, the numbers increased to 1,513 people, against an annual target of 5,201. Figures for the fourth quarter are not yet available.

“Catch-up plan”

This year, the department plans to spend R228-million on in-patient treatment services. Its target for this programme remains 5,201.

The department is funding 479 beds at non-profit rehab centres. The department has additionally refurbished the Mabutho Hlatshwayo state-run rehab in Heidelberg, which has 200 beds. Another state-run centre in Soshanguve, Father Smangaliso, is being refurbished and will add 97 beds to the programme.

Several centres that were defunded last year are now central to the department’s “catch-up” plan, including Freedom Recovery Centre and centres run by the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (SANCA).

SANCA’s Heidelberg branch went without funding for five months last year, says Adri Vermeulen, the organisation’s national coordinator. It was among several branches that temporarily closed their doors. But SANCA was cleared of wrongdoing and started to receive funds again.

Vermeulen says that after the Life Healthcare centres shut down, SANCA was overwhelmed by requests. There is now a long waitlist for people seeking inpatient care. SANCA has, upon request from the department, increased its bed capacity for inpatient care, but it is still not enough to meet demand.

However, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi and MEC for Social Development Faith Mazibuko have launched a new initiative to encourage people to enter rehabs which will further boost demand.

Supply is being increased at non-profit rehab centres as well as the department’s state-run centres, says department spokesperson Motsamai Motlhaolwa. The department is also considering establishing “walk-in centres and day clinics” in the future. Social workers who specialise in substance use disorder have also been appointed.

© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.

We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.