a few months ago. It was a few months, wasn’t it? Feels like centuries have passed since that moment, a brave attempt to give hope to South Africans, broadcast from Cape Town City Hall because the Houses of Parliament had been burnt down just before Sona. At least the ravaging by fire of Parliament allows us to hope that it will eventually be rebuilt, and that South Africa’s democracy will one day be able to face itself in the mirror.
I began to wonder how this selling of hope might work. How does one place a monetary value on hope? Or any kind of value? Perhaps it’s a kind of exchange value, as befits a society in danger of sliding back into a barter economy.some hopes may be relatively small, such as those who hope for a food parcel from the ANC or a free T-shirt from the DA, but there’s an exchange going on here.
But if we don’t have votes to trade for hope, what are we to do? We may not have any money to pay for those hopes, but we can at least neoliberally put a value on them, so that if one day enough of the population gets a job they can buy a little hope for themselves. There’s the hope that our police force might actually be able to solve a few crimes and protect citizens instead of extorting money from the populace, harassing the aforementioned indigents and selling off all that cocaine recently seized at the airport. Call it R108-billion, overall, nationally budgeted for policing. Again, performing the calculation above, we can see that that hope would theoretically cost the citizens of the nation R1,800 each. That’s not an awful lot.