Parliament has raised ‘grave concern’ that the Department of Social Development’s dysfunctionality has led to the collapse of its strategy to fight substance abuse.
The chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Social Development, Bridget Masango, broke the bad news to MP’s on 25 May 2026.
She revealed to Parliament’s Social Services Cluster that the CDA is officially in crisis and that the NDMP has disappeared into the bureaucratic darkness, all apparently due to a budgetary bungle or battle that saw the CDA starved of funds.
CDA an Authority without Authority
In her words: “he Central Drug Authority is now an authority without authority”.
She said the country was facing a substance abuse crisis of note and the Department of Social Development was afflicted by misalignment to the extent that the Department drew up the CDA’s last budget without its involvement and then overspent it by 153% elsewhere.
Putting it politely, Masango said that despite its critical mandate the “CDA is seriously constrained from fully implementing it”.
In a statement following the meeting, Masongo said: “South Africa faces significant challenges in terms of illegal drug markets, with cannabis, methamphetamine (locally known as “tik”), heroin and cocaine being the most prominent” she said. “Alcohol consumption also remains high in South Africa, with binge drinking contributing to significant social issues, including gender-based violence”.
Social Development Dept is to Blame
She laid out the following challenges:
- The five-year term of the CDA Board ended in March 2026. The department knew the Board’s term would end, but did not put measures in place in time to ensure a seamless transition from one Board to the next. It only submitted the candidates’ names to Parliament, as required by the Act, three weeks before the end of March. This did not give Parliament enough time to conduct the recruitment process, which involves establishing a joint sub-committee consisting of Members of the Portfolio Committee in the National Assembly and the Select Committee in the National Council of Provinces.
- The Prevention and Treatment of Substance Act established the CDA as an advisory body located within the Department of Social Development. Its Secretariat is embedded within departmental structures, leading to blurred accountability and reduced institutional autonomy. It thus has a very limited authority over its work.
- As a result, the CDA does not operate with an independent budget, and funds remain under the Department of Social Development (DSD)’s control. This has created a serious misalignment in accountability that the Portfolio Committee is gravely concerned about.
The result of the departmental shambles is that the CDA is now operating in the ether. The authority is meant to co-ordinate the country’s fight against substance abuse, but the current board mandate has expired and no budget has been set aside for its operations, which has put a halt to National Drug Master Plan.
“This has created a serious misalignment in accountability that the Portfolio Committee is gravely concerned about” said Masango. “The CDA reported to the committee that the financial expenditure attributed to it was developed by the department without its involvement and has emphatically distanced itself from this expenditure”
She said that most concerningly, over the past two financial years (2023/2024 and 2024/2025), the there was an alarming over-expenditure of R2.2 million (131.88%) in 2023/2024 and R3.8 million (157.45%) in 2024/2025.
Funny How Hard it is to Find Out Who’s Accountable
She said the CDA’s position was that it is expected to account for expenditure when it had no control over procurement or service providers.
“It becomes an issue when they say to us, you are the one who created this law that puts us in the department, and so you cannot expect us to now account for the funds that we had no authority over. So, it actually makes the Central Drug Authority an authority with no authority, as it were.”
Masango said it remained unclear who should be held accountable for this over expenditure. The committee requested that the department and the CDA work together to draft a detailed financial expenditure report showing their individual expenditures, but to date, that report has not been received.
The CDA’s mandate is to co-coordinate 21 government departments to align them in the fight against substance abuse within the framework of a National Drug Master Plan. It’s meant to monitor the Plan, advise government and ensure the development of prevention, early intervention and after-care strategies and ensure that each government department develops performance indicators.
Masongo said over the years, the CDA had been underfunded. In 2023/2024, it was allocated a budget of R9 million despite costing R20 million, although an additional R9.9 million had been allocated for the upcoming year.
This is What Parliament Says Now Needs to be Done!
Urgently reform the CDA to make it an independent advisory body not only for the Department of Social Development but for all the government departments and other stakeholders that have a role in the fight against drugs and substance abuse.
- Strengthen its institutional positioning within government with a dedicated budget and human resource capacity.
- Strengthen its Secretariat to formalise a scientific monitoring and evaluation system for oversight, engagements and reporting.
- Expedite the amendment of the Prevention of and Treatment of Substance Abuse Act to reform the CDA, as highlighted above.
Repositioning the CDA will align it with other independent advisory agencies in countries such as the UK, which the committee visited in March 2026 to learn best practices from the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). ACMD provides independent scientific advisory work that influences drug policies across government ministries.
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