Knowledge/Seizure: Debt and Data in Kenya’s Zero Balance Economy

This article examines the growth in mobile phone-based lending Kenya, where millions now borrow from services that translate digital data into credit scores. Reeling ongoing retrenchment and marketisation, many find themselves turning to expensive, short-term “buy time”. We depart actuarial approaches economy foreground technical analysis of order emphasise importance racialised expropriation rentier capitalism. focus on Safaricom, corporation at centre debt industry, showing how its infrastructural power absent regulation permit it seize value users. Safaricom serves not only own accumulation, but fiscal imperatives a Kenyan state is, like citizens, groaning under untenable debt. Citizens alike operate within twinned constraints illiquidity volatility, situation we call “zero balance economy”. By linking popular sovereign crises explore parastatal formations predatory inclusion—neither market nor state, an unwieldy amalgamation two.