“Having Experience of What to Do to Succeed”: Unsettling Neoliberalism Through the Lived Experiences of Microcredit Trader‐Borrowers in Ibadan

Abstract

Neoliberal market‐oriented approaches to solving social and economic problems defined as “poverty” have received much attention in anthropology and allied disciplines such as sociology and geography and among development studies scholars and practitioners. Anthropologists have taken up, and often contend with, the paradigmatic discourse of neoliberalism, debating its adequacy as an explanatory framework for understanding the causes and consequences of the political‐economic forces determining the social formations they examine, including those forces resulting in public policies geared toward fighting poverty. This contention is due to anthropology's interests in humans and the dynamics of their relationships with institutions and structures created by them. This contention has made some anthropologists echo their frustration about whether neoliberalism has offered any help at all. Based on ethnographic study conducted in the informal economic sector in Ibadan, southwestern Nigeria, this article offers participants' ideation of “having experience of what to do to succeed” and examines the nature of trust among actors as an alternative perspective of working bottom‐up to explore the nuanced iterative connections between actors at various levels of scale. I argue that “having experience of what to do to succeed” explains how actors at various levels play around the “ephemerality of trust” and “good timing” in achieving their desires for interest‐free microloans and votes needed for electoral success and access to political offices. This idea can bring together the rather mutable and multifaceted, real ways that neoliberalism comes into view. This account shows that Ibadan's manifestation of neoliberalism offers insights into how structural adjustment and neoliberal policies in Nigeria merged with citizens' expectations of politicians in ways that provide a context for the existence of trust (but in which case) that is very ephemeral, and the moral imperative is to take advantage of that trust in a strategic way.