Everyday strategies of debt resistance: the case of fintech in Nigeria

This article examines the resistance strategies employed by fintech users in Jimeta, Nigeria against the violent techniques used by fintech companies to enforce loan repayments. While efforts to extend access to financial services are framed as financial inclusion, they are often entangled with exploitative practices -- what the article terms financial*ised* inclusion -- marked by opaque loan terms, data extraction and violent practices. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research, the article investigates the heterogeneous strategies that fintech users employ to disentangle themselves from such violence, including 'keeping a distance', 'moving' and 'seeking support'. These practices reveal that fintech users are not passive recipients of fintech's disciplinary power, but rather active agents in resisting it. The findings contribute to debates on financialisation, debt and resistance by addressing the limited understanding of how African fintech users contest the ethos of commodity calculation and by enriching scholarship on resistance to everyday technologies.