The symbolic violence of debt discourse: Protesting electricity bills in Kroboland, Ghana

This paper analyzes the contested accounts of protesting and indebted electricity users in Kroboland, Ghana (2014–2022), during periods of heightened utility debt burdens. Utility debts have many causes beyond consumer nonpayment, but these debts have become normalized as economic-legal necessities, leaving the policy-oriented literature focused on residential bills as the main source for cost-recovery. Bill protests are then presented as consumer unwillingness to pay or entitlement to services; this discourse is often supported by elite media and academic literature. Through examining Krobo's electricity bill protests, we find that protests are driven by inconsistent billing practices, aggressive disconnection tactics, the transition to prepaid meters, and historical grievances. We argue that the policy-discourse of debt, whereby the Big Debts of utilities are kept in the shadow of the small debts of ordinary consumers, and the media-discourse of protests, whereby legitimate grievances are interpreted as cultures of nonpayment, can be understood as instances of Bourdieu's symbolic violence. Our research shows that such discourse suppression has led to a way of seeing both debt and protests in an anti-poor manner. We conclude that simple accounts of complex contestations are unlikely to produce politically acceptable or economically viable energy policies.