CHARMAIN NAIDOO: The social grant crisis is the worst form of discrimination
'It's like the people who run this agency don’t care about poor people, 16-million poor people to be exact'
I was 36 when my dad died. I remember the day with glaring clarity. It was hot, early October 1994. I was lying in a hotel room bed in Windhoek, Namibia, scheduled to go into the desert, to Sossusvlei, on a safari of sorts. The phone rang and it was a voice telling me my father had died, to come home. I have never been able to remember who it was who called me that day. All I see is a blur. All I hear is a buzzing in my ear, like the background noise when you’re on a night flight, and everyone around you is asleep, except for those insomniacs who will tell you they never sleep on planes, whose small screens flicker in front of them. I find that dull whooshing noise that comes from the engines comforting and reassuring. The white noise in my hotel room on that early morning I heard that my father died was neither of those things. It was a doom drone. I sat there, utterly bereft. On my own. The press junket I was on had not brought any of my friends to this lonely town. I didn’t feel ...
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