Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana

Abstract

In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.