A lottery-funded old age home in the Free State is yet to open its doors, despite receiving over R27.5m in grants over the past five years, reports GroundUp.

The Free State Department of Social Development (DSD) said it was not consulted about the plan to build the home by the Southern African Youth Movement (SAYM), which received the multimillion-rand funding, including the initial location of the home in Botshabelo, or when it was moved to Thaba Nchu after protests in which the partially-built facility was vandalised.

When the department ‘was eventually consulted’ in 2022, it had ‘advised that the old age home be repurposed to a substance abuse halfway house’.

That's according to Lindiwe Mnguni, the DSD’s acting head of communications and marketing. 

The funding for the old age home was part of several grants totalling over R67.5m doled out to SAYM-related entities by the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) since 2016.

The grants are all recorded in NLC annual reports under several slightly different variations of the organisation’s name.

SAYM also received almost R27m from the NLC to build a drug rehabilitation centre in Mbombela in Mpumalanga, which is still not completed or operational, and R15m to produce and stage a drug awareness musical, which only ran for a handful of performances.

SAYM’s board chair, Dr Lekgotla Mafisa, claimed his organisation had ‘consulted broadly with various stakeholders, including the DSD, before the facility’s construction commenced'.

The NLC, in response to questions about SAYM’s various lottery-funded projects, said: ‘We confirm that the SAYM has received funding from the NLC. We are unfortunately unable to refer to any documentation or verify information regarding the inquiry as all proactive funding files have been seized by the Special Investigating Unit as part of their ongoing investigation.’

Full GroundUp report