Digital financialization through demonetization: disruption, fintech adoption and everyday endurance in Nigeria

Abstract

On 26 October 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced a demonetization exercise aimed at curbing corruption and advancing digital financial inclusion. While the policy was framed as a modernizing reform, this paper argues that it consolidated a hybrid financial realm dominated by fintech firms. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, Nigeria, the paper explores how disruption triggered by demonetization created a systemic vacuum, turning cash itself into a scarce and tradable commodity, that fintech was positioned to fill. These applications facilitated payments and extended quick loans as traditional banking infrastructures collapsed, thereby intensifying coercive forms of digital inclusion, surveillance, and economic extraction. Yet, these dynamics were not passively accepted: The paper highlights how individuals and sub-national actors engaged in practices of endurance to navigate hardship, including trust-based transactions, informal lending, and alternative financial arrangements. In doing so, it contributes to debates in political economy and financialization by showing how digital finance unfolds through state failure and everyday negotiation.