Note: This is the literal proposal as sent on December 16, 2012 to the coordinators of the NWO/NRF collaboration, prof. Wijers and Kraan-Korteweg. Because of an unclear agreement on the actual submission to NWO/NRF this proposal is only now formally submitted to both agencies. The working group on Astrophysical transients, their hosts and their physics,established under the NWO/NRF bilateral agreement in Astronomy and enabling technologies for Astronomy, has a natural focus on the approved two large radio transient surveys defined on the SKA-precursor telescope MeerKAT (TRAPUM and ThunderKAT) and the closely associated LOFAR transient key science project (TKP) on LOFAR2. Preparatory work on these large surveys and their associated science programs are currently ongoing at a number of Dutch and South African research institutes and universities, in close collaboration with the Universities of Southampton and Manchester in the UK. These projects have already established close ties between a number of institutes in the Netherlands and South Africa, both in terms of research visits of senior staff and joint co-supervision of South African postgraduate students. The latter is best illustrated by the current Erasmus Mundus SAPIENT exchange between the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Radboud University Nijmegen (RU) of two South African PhD students. It is on this strong foundation that this working group seeks to strengthen existing research collaborations and identify growing areas of common research interest in astrophysical transients and their hosts by bringing together researchers in South Africa and the Netherlands through a research exchange program involving staff, postdocs and postgraduate students, and joint workshops. As transient astronomy is multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomy, this working group automatically includes efforts both at radio, optical, X-rays wavelengths as well as astroparticle physics. Within this context, the working group identifies the concept of a small optical telescope (MeerLICHT) with an instantaneous field-of-view identical to MeerKAT and permanently linked in real-time to MeerKAT, as a novel and innovative approach to transient science, maximising the scientific returns of the fully commensal observing mode of MeerKAT as employed by ThunderKAT and TRAPUM. We also identify a need for high-energy coverage, in particular from space. Given the membership of RU in Virgo, the North-West University (NWU) participation, and a University of Amsterdam (UvA)/RU-led proposal for participation in the Cerenkov Telescope Array (CTA), it is natural to include multi-messenger astronomy within this working group, as the source populations of transients are also the natural source populations of TeV photons and gravitational waves.