Is financial inclusion synonymous with consumer credit aka debt?

For years now, since the launch of a certain minimum viable product, MVP, called mPesa that scaled unexpected in Kenya, the continent has seen thousands of initiatives targeted at financial inclusion yet mPesa in its basic form is a money transfer and payment platform.

I refer to mPesa as an MVP because all it was testing a single hypothesis that people would accept a text message as proof of money received, sadly they where testing it in Kenya whose people have very peculiar behaviours compared to other Africans as they have a of morphing culture to suite the times.

My position is validated by the fragile nature of the mpesa platform that has become the backbone of the Kenyan money transfer sector as it replaced the older "matatu" transfer service and postal money order.

If you want a more detailed explanation of what the former was you can read the following article that I penned a while back Mpesa, an accidental success.

I provided that history so that you can get an appreciation of the fact, I am told I should say my opinion, that mPesa really does not play any part in providing financial inclusion as the service it offers existed in Kenya for decades from as far back as before independence.

So when others come along to offer "financial inclusion" products sitting squarely on the mPesa platform it gives me the jitters as there is a clear deception going on in such a narrative.

In my opinion, mPesa is nothing more than an efficient delivery mechanism to getting us addicted to consumer credit first in Kenya and then extending into Africa. The behaviour had been tested with the Safaricom PLC Okoa Jahazi product which offered "unsecured" credit on airtime.

It validated that consumer credit was acceptable so long as it was not called "credit" but was instead given a cool sounding swahili term. Kenyan's had had a bad experience with credit/charge cards in the 90's as many ended up in debt, including yours truly, thus leaving a bad taste for credit amongst the upper middle and upper income earners.

Like any addictive drug peddler will tell you, the process of acquiring new customers is by being subtle in introducing them to the drug then getting more aggressive once the client is hooked and can't stop digging themselves deeper into debt as they hope to get out of the hole.

The only thing that is inclusive about easily accessible loans and buy now, pay later (BNPL) is joining the west in creating a society totally dependent aka addicted to credit and thus the death of our innate ability to defer consumption.

What triggered this article was the celebration of an organisation offering consumer credit for providing financial inclusion.

A few days ago while watching a video on YouTube an advertisement popped up for a mobile lending provider and since I was idle I decided to download it, when I read the terms of service I was scared about what it was asking me to give it access to from my address book to my diary as well as my location.

That experience brought a sharp contrast to the show Squid Games on Netflix, ignore the similarity at your own peril, the interest rate on the particular app was 78% over 3 months and the fact that they have customers tells you the depth to which we have gotten to in such a short time.

We have in a few years got to the credit dependency levels that took the US decades from the 1920s. The addiction is so rampant, not even our SACCO movements have been spared, that the mere suggestion that we need to go back to having a savings culture leads to serious public convulsions.

I will leave it there and wait for the convulsions online,