Chop money life: Joblessness,unretirement,and dependence among transport workers in urban Ghana

Abstract

In this article, I explore how older, jobless informal workers in urban Ghana’s transport sector struggle to sustain their livelihoods by relying on associational solidarity, particularly the redistributive practice of ‘chop money.’ I situate my analysis of the social and economic implications of chop money dependence in the context of the sweeping precarization of urban labour since the 1980s, as well as the absence of public welfare provision and diminishing family support resources. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine tensions around solidarity, dependence, and culturally shaped notions of male responsibility. I argue that a focus on the (failed) life course transitions of ageing transport workers offers important insights in relation to informality, the challenges of unretirement, and the ambivalent relationships established through non-kin support networks.

‘No chop for lazy men,’ reads the inscription on a food stall at Accra’s central bus station. This proverb about the importance of chop – which means ‘to eat,’ ‘food,’ and ‘sustenance’ in Ghanaian English – captures a widely held ethic across Anglophone West Africa: sustenance must be earned through hard work, and idleness is morally condemned. For BB, ¹ a former commercial bus driver, this principle defined a career spanning over four decades of long shifts and steady labour. Yet, like many in Ghana’s transport sector, BB’s income never allowed him to save for retirement. In his early sixties when I first met him, he was well respected by the people at the bus station, who referred to him as ‘senior,’ a title akin to the Akan òpanyin, or ‘elderly gentleman’ (van der Geest, 1998). Yet, his age now bars him from being hired by car owners, and his seniority prevents him from taking on menial jobs like loading or cleaning buses. Out of work and without sufficient resources, BB survives on donations from former colleagues, known as ‘chop money.’ His predicament underscores the precarious reality of ageing for informal workers, for many of whom retirement is less a life stage than a state of functional joblessness.

What happens when informal workers grow old? What forms of support – or gaps in support – exist for them as they age, especially in contexts where pensions and formal welfare systems are absent? How do kinship norms and workplace solidarity shape their efforts to sustain livelihoods, and what tensions arise within these support networks?

These questions are particularly urgent in Africa and the Global South, where informal sector work accounts for the majority of non-agricultural employment (Cunningham et al., 2024), most of which falls outside pension schemes (Hu and Stewart, 2009). Within the now growing social studies literature on ageing in Africa, livelihoods of older informal workers remain a surprisingly underexplored area. Barring few notable exceptions concerned with absent pensions and old-age poverty (Ezeh et al., 2006; Kakwani and Son, 2006), much of the focus is on the uncertainties of elder care in rapidly changing contexts (Coe and Alber, 2018; Hoffman and Pype, 2018). Analytically, research around issues of ageing and informality is dominated by macroeconomic approaches that emphasize development and policy responses such as social pensions (for instance, Canelas and Niño-Zarazúa, 2022; Guven, 2019; Hu and Stewart, 2009). While these frameworks highlight critical structural deficiencies, they mostly overlook the social and cultural dimensions of older informal workers’ strategies for survival.

In this article, I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to provide a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of ageing among urban informal workers, focusing on older, jobless workers in Ghana’s transport sector – an industry widely seen as emblematic of informality (Agbiboa, 2018; Cervero, 2000). By the ‘informal sector,’ I refer to the diverse forms of often precarious income opportunities that are located within low levels of state purview, protection, and support. ² In contrast to macro-economic approaches that frame ageing informal workers primarily through statistical measures of income in/security and pension policy gaps, I situate their experiences within broader social and transactional relationships of professional affiliation and kinship and explore how culturally shaped notions of work (and its absence), age, respectability, reciprocity, and gendered responsibility influence their livelihoods and struggles.

I develop my analysis around the practice and concept of chop money, which encapsulates central aspects of solidarity, survival, dependence, and social hierarchy in informal redistribution systems. In the wider social context, including household and apprentice relationships, chop money refers to small cash sums provided for daily expenses, mainly food. Among Ghana’s transport workers, chop money functions as a welfare mechanism that counteracts some of the structural weaknesses of the sector (which I detail below) – notably, the absence of unemployment benefits, pensions, or public welfare provision. ³

For the older jobless transport workers like BB, chop money provides essential help for survival, yet it also creates dependence that conflicts with their status as ‘seniors.’ This tension is especially pronounced among workers in advanced middle age (roughly 50–65 years), many of whom entered the labour market as urban migrants in the 1980s and 1990s, often in ‘unregistered jobs’ (Potts, 2008). Now deemed unfit for most transport roles yet not physically infirm, these men are often considered – and consider themselves to be – outside their family’s care responsibilities. Straddling the divide between work and retirement, their dependence on workplace solidarity networks creates a precarious and distressing situation, to which this article seeks to draw attention.

By examining how jobless older transport workers in urban Ghana navigate the competing demands of professional solidarity, family responsibilities, and economic dependence, I make two interrelated arguments. First, building on insights into informal redistribution practices under economic pressures (Bähre, 2007; Raudenbush, 2016), I challenge romanticized notions of solidarity among the urban poor by highlighting the ambivalence that characterizes informal welfare mechanisms like chop money. These mechanisms are shaped by struggles over affiliation, dependence, and respectability, reflecting broader tensions inherent in precarious work and advanced age unemployment. Practices of solidarity are further complicated by a structural mismatch between enduring notions of male responsibility and the declining opportunities for self-sustenance over the life course, which influences how ageing male informal workers negotiate – and often defer – familial support.

Second, I argue for expanding scholarly perspectives on unemployment to include older workers in the Global South. While much attention has been given to youth unemployment, particularly in the African context, with concepts such as Africa’s ‘youth unemployment crisis’ (Ackah-Baidoo, 2016), ‘crisis of becoming’ (Abbink, 2005), and ‘waithood’ (Honwana, 2012), the same economic and structural pressures also impose significant challenges on older generations. Demographic and social transitions such as rapid urbanization, increased life expectancy, shrinking household sizes, and, arguably, shifting norms around intergenerational support (Agyemang, 2021) exacerbate these challenges. ⁴ As urban populations age and family networks contract, familial support is becoming increasingly strained, as are the workplace redistribution systems to which jobless informal workers resort – in the context of transport work in urban Ghana: chop money.

I begin with a brief overview of my research methodology, followed by a discussion of labour relations in Ghana’s transport sector, focusing on shifts in working conditions since the 1980s and the enduring association of transport work with masculine identity. In the main ethnographic sections, I examine the life histories and (failed) life course transitions of BB and another older, jobless driver to explore the ambivalent relationship between solidarity and dependence. The discussion relates their experiences to normative ideas of male responsibility, deferred family support and return migration, as well as the social and existential precariousness associated with ageing and unemployment. I conclude by scaling up my analysis of the tensions surrounding informal support systems to address some of the broader challenges of joblessness and unretirement among ageing informal workers.

Fieldwork and methodology

The analysis I develop here draws on 12 months of ethnographic research I conducted with transport workers in Ghana’s capital Accra from 2011 to 2013, with follow-up visits in 2018, 2019, 2021/22, and 2024. My primary field site was a central bus station, a vital hub for both employed and out of work transport workers. My main fieldwork method was ‘thick participation’ – a ‘radicalized form of participant observation’ (Spittler, 2001: 1), which in my research involved taking on apprenticeship-like roles within the station’s transport trades. Through sustained practices of learning, socializing, and collaborating that go beyond the common requirement to establish rapport, my engagements with the communities of transport workers helped me build an intimate understanding of different dimensions of work-related struggles, including struggles for employment and self-sustenance.

This immersive approach also allowed me to access forms of concealed practices and knowledge revealed to initiates only. One significant aspect concerned the collection and reliance on chop money – often a source of shame tied to the incapacity to sustain oneself and the perception of economic redundancy – which the transport workers treated with evasiveness, although it is widely acknowledged as a responsibility of collective support. I have also conducted open-ended interviews with transport workers of varying ages and roles, discussing topics around work, income, and family relations. While English was my primary medium, I also relied on my competence in Twi, Ghana’s main vernacular.

My ethnography focuses on the lives of two chop money recipients. My description of their backgrounds and circumstances is based on collaborative work and conversations carried out intermittently over a period of some 10 years, through which I sought to reconstruct the life transitions and individual experiences while situating them within the broader context of social and economic change. The long relationship I developed with both men informed my decision to place their life trajectories at the center of this study. Over the years, I witnessed various practices and conflicts surrounding their chop money dependence and engaged with many of their close colleagues and some family members. Both individuals represent a significant cohort of urban informal workers who entered the labour market in the 1980s and are now approaching or have reached retirement age – a stage that, as I will show, often translates into state of functional joblessness and unretirement.

I here convey a specifically gendered perspective, as most of my research participants in the transport sector were men. However, my arguments are similarly relevant to female informal workers, who represent a larger proportion of informal work engagements and often find themselves in vulnerable situations, particularly in advanced age (Chant and Pedwell, 2008).

Transport work in Ghana

In Ghana, as in many African countries, public road transport is primarily not a public undertaking but is managed by a multitude of labourers and small private investors. Its decentralized operations are characterized by low levels of central planning, relatively easy entry (of both labour and capital), and high competition and economic niches (Stasik, 2025). This results in working conditions marked by uncertainty, including lack of protection and benefits. Similar to transport workers in other African countries (Cissokho, 2022; Rizzo, 2017), those in Ghana’s transport sector face structural disadvantages associated with the ‘sub-proletariat’ (Hart, 1973: 61). Additionally, competitive pressures, market volatility, and reliance on often unreliable vehicles increase risks for workers and vehicle owners alike, including entrepreneurial failure, injury, invalidity, or even death (Stasik, 2018; Klaeger, 2014; Verrips and Meyer, 2001).

Despite these risks, transport work continues to hold the allure of ‘enchanted self making’ (Quayson, 2014: 134). Central to this appeal is the cultural image of the commercial driver, vested with values of autonomy, worldliness, and self-reliance. Interpreting the inscriptions on Ghanaian commercial vehicles, van der Geest (2009: 266) summarizes this appeal in the ‘romantic image of the driver for whom everything seems within reach: money, travel, women – in short, the good life.’ Hart links the consolidation of driving as an occupational category in the mid-twentieth century to colonial capitalism’s reshaping of gendered occupational divides, particularly the rise of (male) wage labour and (female) market trade, which redefined notions of ‘gendered respectability’ and status (Hart, 2016: 99; see also Thiel and Stasik, 2016).

For men, respectability and status were traditionally indicated by access to land and human resources, which could be converted into wealth (Brown, 1984). Transport work reconfigured these markers by being ‘based on skill rather than resources’ (Hart, 2016: 107). For young men with limited means, it offered opportunities to attain normative expectations of adult masculinity outside traditional pathways. The economic self-sufficiency achieved by (successful) drivers not only enabled them to realize the status of male adult respectability but also to craft identities as ‘modern men’ (Hart, 2016: 96). This idealized image of drivers served as a powerful symbolic device, masking the reality that, as Hart (1970: 109–110) noted for the late 1960s, many ‘would-be operators […] underestimate the savoir-faire required to run transport successfully,’ making it ‘an entrepreneurs’ graveyard.’

From the early 1980s, structural adjustment policies reshaped Ghana’s transport sector, triggering cuts in formal employment and exacerbating urban labour market imbalances (Stasik, 2015; Godard and Turnier, 1992). Simultaneously, government reforms favoured private transport (Fouracre et al., 1994), fuelling unprecedented growth in the sector. Bus stations emerged as bustling economic hubs, integrating a growing workforce of drivers, station staff, and street-based services (Stasik, 2025; Stasik and Klaeger, 2018).

The transport sector’s capacity to absorb additional labour relied heavily on the organizational structure of the station branches, key units in Ghana’s public transport system. Linked to national transport associations, the branches function as entry points for drivers, station workers, and vehicle owners. Vehicle owners typically hire drivers on a commission basis, often with one vehicle per owner but multiple drivers per vehicle. Each branch consists of two main groups: the ‘office staff,’ comprising five long-serving administrative officers who provide about the only age-appropriate roles for older transport workers, and the ‘yard staff,’ mainly younger recruits responsible for loading vehicles. This hierarchical structure reflects a status distinction between ‘big men’ and ‘small boys’ (Nugent, 1995), representing the relationship between rulers and ruled. While drivers, the largest group, are not formally part of the branch staff, they rely on the branch for vehicle loading, maintaining strong, often life-long loyalty. Income for all three groups comes solely from ticket sales. After completed loading, ticket proceeds are shared among drivers, yard and office staff, and later passed on to vehicle owners, which is also the time when chop money is distributed.

Everybody needs to chop

As the stations absorbed more labour and capital, branches expanded their fleets and the number of yard staff and drivers, resulting in a growing surplus of workers. Rather than maximising existing capacities, the economic rationale favoured multiplication. While this may not stem from an ethos of solidarity, it has enabled more and more people to earn a living in the transport sector, regardless of their status and qualifications. In response to rising workforce competition, station workers began dividing returns into smaller portions, attempting to satisfy everyone’s ‘need to chop’ (as a popular Ghanaian saying goes), albeit on an increasingly meagre diet.

The processes that allowed for the integration of more job-seekers into the transport sector have also resulted in a growing number of jobless ‘seniors.’ Today, many transport workers who entered the labour market around the 1980s are now too old to drive or perform the ‘small boy’ yard work, yet there are too few positions among the ‘big men’ office staff to accommodate them. Most of these ‘seniors’ lack accumulated savings and do not receive any pension or fringe benefits. Consequently, both the growth and the sweeping informalisation of the urban workforce exacerbates the economic insecurity and precarity that have already affected their active working lives. ⁵

In this context, chop money serves as an informal welfare mechanism that helps to remedy structural shortcomings in Ghana’s transport sector, if with limited and ambivalent effects. Its distribution lacks guaranteed equal shares and established rules for eligibility. Age differences do influence distributive practices, as older workers are more likely to receive a share than younger ones, who are expected to work harder to earn their chop. As the following description of BB’s path into chop money dependence and his collection practice illustrates, chop money distribution operates as a highly personalized form of workplace solidarity that simultaneously marks an unsuccessful life course transition associated with shame and thwarted ideas of male respectability.

Chop money paths

Born in the early 1950s on a cocoa farm near Kumasi, BB never attended school and entered the transport business as an adolescent when a cocoa-hauling truck driver took him on as an assistant. After a few years of apprenticeship, he transitioned to assisting drivers of passenger vehicles on the Accra-Kumasi route before eventually becoming a driver himself, primarily for Accra-based car owners. He has remained loyal to this route ever since.

BB met his wife, a market trader from eastern Ghana, at the station in Accra. They married in the mid-1970s and settled in the city. They have a daughter who completed primary school and later married a craftsman from her mother’s hometown, where she now lives and is the mother of two grown-up children. In the mid-1980s, when property prices in Accra fell, BB and his wife bought two rooms in a compound house on a shared plot near the station, from which they pursued their trades for the next three decades. During the 1990s, BB briefly owned two vehicles, one of which he drove himself. However, he struggled with the maintenance work, and when the vehicles broke down beyond repair, he resorted to driving on a commission basis.

When I first met BB in 2011, he had been out of driving for 2 years, following the death of his wife the previous year. He typically visited the station on Fridays, the busiest day of the week, where he would spend the day chatting with station workers, drivers, and saleswomen. He returned to the station daily until Monday, when the last drivers came back from their weekend trips.

Initially, I perceived BB’s position as synonymous with the title ‘senior’ that the station workers used to address him: a status earned through merit and decades of experience that placed him at the top of the station’s social hierarchy. However, unlike some of his former driving colleagues, he did not transition into the settled, age-appropriate branch work. His seniority was not reflected in his occupational status. I realized this when I asked him how a retired driver actually makes a living. ‘I’m not retired,’ he replied, adding: ‘I’m out of work.’

While BB’s continued presence at the station stemmed from a desire to pass the time and maintain old relationships, it was also driven by economic necessity, particularly his need to collect chop money. He went to great lengths to conceal the purpose of his visits. Mobilizing a wide network of colleagues beyond his immediate work associates, he collected his chop money from various drivers and station workers, with an estimated four to five donors daily.

The amount he received from each donor was usually the smallest value banknote at the time, one Ghana Cedi, worth about half a Euro in 2011. BB performed these transactions furtively. Reminiscent of how traffic policemen collect their ‘dash’ (bribe) from drivers, he would silently hand his worn shoulder bag to the donor, who would slip in the hoped-for sum. Not everyone he approached gave him money, but failed attempts appeared to be rare.

His choice to come to the station mainly on weekend days was influenced by the fluctuating profits volume. Demand for transport is generally lower on weekdays, resulting in reduced earnings for drivers and station workers, making it harder to sustain claims for chop money solidarity. His regular absence also allowed him to maintain a sense of self-worth, even if it sometimes led to tedious boredom. He remarked that he had nowhere else to go but to the station. He attended church sporadically while his wife was alive but has stopped going altogether since her death. Like many other transport workers, BB’s life revolved around the station, which served as both a workplace and a place to socialize.

Male responsibility and deferred family support

BB’s situation highlights the relationship between the economic exigencies of advanced age unemployment and the social constraints of relying on work-based solidarity networks, which often serve as the primary means of support for jobless informal workers. His economic circumstances were somewhat alleviated by not having to pay rent, only intermittent utilities, which he significantly reduced after his wife’s death. During my visits to his nearby house, he typically sat in the shared courtyard and went to bed at sunset, minimizing electricity use. He relied on a small charcoal stove for meals and tea, avoiding the large gas cooker his wife used.

For BB and many other older transport workers struggling to make ends meet, family support is often neither a viable nor a desirable alternative. The expectation that core or extended family members will look after their ageing relatives – a notion promoted by Ghanaian politicians and policymakers (van der Geest, 2018) – is largely rejected by transport workers, at least until they reach a state of infirmity.

Studies of the livelihoods of ageing populations in Ghana and other African contexts suggest that the declining resource capability of younger generations contribute to a neglect, leading to what has been termed a ‘crisis of family support’ (Aboderin, 2004: S128; Ferreira, 2004). This supposed crisis is particularly pronounced in urban areas, where families are often dispersed across households and geographical distances. Arguably, it is further exacerbated by a gradual erosion of traditional values of filial support and broader changes in the ‘regimes of responsibility’ (Rubbers and Jedlowski, 2020).

The aspects of my ethnography relevant to this discussion only partially support this argument. Many transport workers’ adult children are themselves working in the urban informal sector, often facing difficult financial situations that limit their ability to provide adequate and regular support to their parents. When resources for mutual support are available, priority is generally given to younger family members, both within the core and extended family, particularly for expenses related to education and healthcare.

BB had a good relationship with his daughter. He wished that she would call him more often, but he did not reproach her for the lack of financial support, nor did he blame other members of his extended family, most of whom lived outside Accra. Instead of lamenting the absence of kinship assistance, he expressed frustration at being unable to fulfil his previous commitment to support his daughter and his relatives’ children. He emphasized that the least he could now do was to avoid burdening them with his difficult situation.

BB’s case reflects the experience of other older transport workers I have worked with, highlighting a continued adherence to culturally-shaped notions of male responsibility, particularly pronounced in the male-dominated field of commercial transport. These notions, tied to broader values of social status and respectability, designate men as primary providers for their families and themselves. While this patriarchal ideal has long been challenged by women’s contribution to household maintenance and reproduction, it is considerably complicated by the difficulties faced by male ‘breadwinners’ in earning sufficient income to support themselves, let alone other household members.

This may indicate less a crisis of family support or filial responsibility and more an emerging, if long looming, decline in opportunities for self-sustenance throughout the life course, particularly in advanced age. In the context of transport work, this is evident in the structural lag between normative expectations when an individual should stop working and enter a retirement-equivalent life stage and the reality of having to do so due to physical incapacity or competition from succeeding generations.

The implications of this lag are also affected by a break from earlier patterns of long-term circular migration. Few ageing transport workers I encountered, most of whom hail from outside Accra, view returning to their hometowns as desirable or even viable. While many consider it a potential future option, they normally defer its realization. Unlike earlier generations of urban migrants, who sought cash income in cities during early adulthood and returned home intermittently or latest at the transition to mature adulthood to assume positions of authority (Caldwell, 1969), many of today’s ageing urban migrants seem unwilling or unprepared to return (IOM, 2020). Factors such as the fear of returning empty-handed, a lack of strength, skills, or resources for farming and housing, and the inability to claim family resources due to prolonged absence discourage return migration, especially since many, if not all, of their children now reside in urban areas as well.

The interplay of traditional notions of adult male responsibility, deferred family support, and reluctance or inability to return to rural homesteads place jobless transport workers in a vulnerable position. As illustrated by the second, more severe case of Raymond, reliance on informal non-kin support networks, represented by chop money, can trap the receiver into a spiral of escalating social and economic decline, where the bonds of associational solidarity become intertwined with a specific form of associational bondage.

Chop money bondage

Raymond is known by the female nickname of Dede among his colleagues at the station, which he earned when he began driving a bus with his owner’s daughter’s name, Dede, on its back. The commercial success of his earlier career made it easier for him to handle the teasing. However, when adversity struck, the teasing took on a sense of humiliation. When I first met Raymond in 2013, he was in his late fifties and had been divorced for some 20 years. He had two children from his marriage, whom he rarely saw. He was hesitant to discuss his family and mentioned only once that a dispute about inheritance had caused a rift with his siblings. His occupational history was turbulent, reflecting the experience of many transport workers of his generation. Born in a small town in western Ghana, he dropped out of secondary school due to a lack of parental support and held about a dozen temporary jobs. His job search eventually took him to the port city of Tema, where he first worked on a container vessel and later at the harbour after becoming a father and getting married. This stable employment, which he called his first ‘years of prosperity,’ ended in the early 1990s when the subcontractor he worked for failed. After struggling to find another job in the harbour and spending time at home ‘doing nothing,’ he entered the transport business with the help of his wife’s relatives.

Raymond started as a taxi driver in Tema but soon transitioned to the more profitable Tema-Accra route, which brought him to the station in Accra. He initially drove a vehicle owned by his wife’s maternal uncle, Dede’s father. However, after his marriage ended, so did his employment. Raymond then secured a new patron among his branch officers at the Accra station and drove for them for several years. During this time, he managed to save part of his income and eventually became, as he described, ‘entrepreneurial.’ Using his savings as start-up capital, he entered a hire-purchase arrangement with a Nigerian businessman to acquire his own vehicle, despite a high 25% interest rate. Becoming an ‘owner-driver’ ushered his second ‘years of prosperity,’ though this phase, too, was short lived.

An accident abruptly ended Raymond’s pursuit of full vehicle ownership and dashed his hopes of economic independence. The accident left him with a permanent eye injury, and a completely destroyed vehicle. Since the accident was his fault, he had to pay compensation to the other party. Left broke and in debt, Raymond managed to shift creditors by securing a loan from his branch officers to settle the remainder of his original loan. Although this allowed him to escape the burden of a high-interest rate, it left him bound to his branch in a kind of association bondage.

Constraints of solidarity

Caught in a web of financial dependency and obligation, Raymond became reliant on his station branch. Unable to afford rent, he found shelter at the station, spending his days in the branch office waiting for occasional work and his nights sleeping in parked buses. ⁶ Since the accident, his chances of finding a new patron to entrust him with a vehicle were slim. The combination of his advanced age, injured eye, and the stigma of causing an accident rendered him unemployable.

Occasionally, Raymond filled in as a ‘spare driver’ for branch vehicles when another driver was unavailable, but such opportunities were infrequent. Unlike BB, he actively sought out menial jobs at the station, helping to load and clean buses. These tasks were ill-suited to his age, a fact often highlighted by the young loading boys he assisted, most less than half his age, who mocked him with the derisive address ‘agya Dede,’ blending his female nickname with the Twi word for ‘father.’

Raymond’s challenges extended beyond financial deprivation and the absence of prospects for a proper (informal) job; he was also burdened by debt. His economic reliance on the solidarity of his colleagues was compounded by a precarious social position. Too old to engage full-time in the physically demanding work of loading and too diminished in standing to ascent to the senior role of branch officer, he found himself trapped. The respect required for a senior position was out of reach, leaving him to navigate ridicule and shame out of necessity.

He avoided answering my question about how much he owned the creditors from his branch. However, he frequently expressed how reliance on chop money ‘pulled him down’ both financially and socially. He relied on two forms of chop money: one was the small amount he earned from sporadic work, most of which he used to pay off his debts in small increments; the other was what he asked from his fellow workers to cover his basic living expenses, primarily for food and bathing. His precarious position as an irregularly (under)paid, needy, and indebted ‘senior’ made his requests for chop money particularly prone to cause discomfort for both him and the colleagues he approached. Often, rather than receiving cash for ‘chop’ (food), he was invited to share meals with others, which somewhat alleviated the awkwardness of the situation.

Balancing necessity with dependence required significant self-overcoming for Raymond, as did his efforts to curb the effects of implicit or explicit humiliation. However, what troubled him most was the obligation to reciprocate the solidarity of his colleagues with unwavering professional commitment to his branch. The loyalty precluded him from seeking alternative job opportunities with other branches. When I asked why he did not pursue work elsewhere, he curtly replied, ‘Betrayal.’ He did take on small-scale work by helping out established vendors affiliated with other branches, either by unloading goods or covering for temporarily absent vendors. Taking on transport-related tasks – like loading or driving vehicles – for another branch would have been tantamount to promoting a competitor’s business, and would therefore be considered an act of ‘betrayal.’

While workplace solidarity centred around chop money distributions helped Raymond maintain a livelihood (however meagre) and work towards paying off his debts (however intermittently), the associational bonds that underpinned this solidarity also imposed severe constraints on his actions – though these constraints might also be seen as a form of collateral that eased pressure by ensuring he could repay in instalments, secure in the knowledge that he would not abandon the branch. From Raymond’s perspective, however, the situation echoed that of informal shoemakers in Nigeria described by Meagher, whose marginal position made them ‘seem more like flies than spiders in the web of associational life’ (2010: 120). He was less rescued than captive in informal associational practices of solidarity and support.

Stuck in dependence

When I first revisited the station in 2018, BB and Raymond were still there. Time had visibly taken a toll on both of them. They seemed to have aged far more than the 5 years since I had last seen them. BB had maintained his visiting relationship with his station branch, where a new board of branch officers had conferred upon him the honorary title ‘Senior Associate.’ While this title carried no privileges, it gave BB a more recognized presence at the station. Nevertheless, he remained dependent on the willingness of his colleagues to provide him with chop money.

Raymond, still called Dede, had worked off his debts and discontinued his odd jobs of loading and cleaning buses. But he remained loyal to his branch. He had entered into a more permanent arrangement with an established female vendor selling goods outside the branch office. This involvement in the female economic domain led to new ridicule from his male colleagues. Primarily responsible for guarding the goods at night, he entered a more stable sleeping arrangement. During the day, he occasionally ran errands for the vendor but otherwise remained idle and largely impassive. He avoided discussing the details of his working relationship with the vendor; it seemed he did not receive a regular wage, only small, irregular payments. He had moved from one chop money dependence to another.

Raymond spent much of his time studying the weekly lottery newspapers, attempting to predict winning numbers by spotting trends in past draws. A ‘serious win,’ he claimed, would allow him to achieve his ultimate goal: returning to his hometown to buy a small plot of land for farming. However, the minimal amounts he bet would hardly be sufficient, and he did not seem to invest much hope in this plan.

BB’s and Raymond’s behaviour was marked by a palpable sense of stasis and surrender. The prospect of ever working as drivers again seemed completely out of reach for both of them. Unlike 5 years ago, their lack of job prospects no longer even elicited voiced discontent. With frustration looming large, both appeared to have lost hope of improving their situations.

The sense of entrapment or ‘stuckedness’ (Hage, 2009: 97) that characterized their work and life experiences resonates with the plight of many un- and underemployed youth across the continent (Hansen, 2005; Mains, 2012). Deprived of opportunities to ‘go somewhere’ in life, they reflect what Hage (2009: 97) describes as ‘existential immobility,’ which relates primarily to contextual factors like the absence of a formal welfare systems, labour market imbalances, and economic deprivation. It also encompasses experiential dimensions, including uncertainty, disillusionment, social marginalisation, and a limited horizon of expectations.

Despite these parallels, age makes a significant difference here in at least two ways. First, unlike many young people, BB and Raymond largely lack the belief that adversity can be overcome with time, patience, and perseverance. The temporal reasoning that characterizes many youths’ waithood, often linked to hopes of outward movement, holds little relevance to them. Instead of fostering ‘hopefulness against all odds’ (Kleist and Jansen, 2016: 374), BB and Raymond seem drastically realistic regarding their slim chances of rebuilding a viable livelihood. Second, while their advanced age diminishes expectations for a better future, it is also their seniority that allows them to continue relying on informal networks of non-kin solidarity and support. Long-term dependence on chop money, which helps them sustain their livelihoods through small monetary donations or practices of commensality (i.e., actual ‘chop’), would not be an option for younger jobless transport workers, who would be expected to either ‘try harder’ or change professions.

When I returned to the station in late 2021, both BB and Raymond were no longer there. I had already learned of BB’s sudden death earlier that year, which occurred during the lockdown imposed by the Ghanaian government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Accra. The transport services at the station had been suspended for some 2 weeks during the lockdown, abruptly cutting off sources of income and redistribution. Members of his station branch told me that he had been suffering from an infection, with the effects worsened by a lack of treatment. However, it remained unclear whether the lack of treatment was due to financial constraints, the unavailability of medical care during the partial lockdown, or a combination of both.

Raymond also disappeared in the aftermath of the lockdown. The woman he worked for told me that he had stayed at the station when transport services were disrupted, managing to survive by pilfering from deserted shops (as many people did) while still guarding her shop. A few days after the lockdown ended, she went to the station to find that he had left without notice. He has not been seen since. In my search for his whereabouts, I was put in touch with people from his hometown, who informed me that he had not been seen for over a decade, dashing my hopes that he might have returned after all.

Meanwhile, the number of out-of-work transport workers appeared to have risen considerably. Many of the drivers and station staff I had known for years had lost their position and were replaced by new, younger workers. Like BB before, they continued their routine of coming to the station, taking pains to conceal that their presence was driven not by any work activity, but that they were waiting for the opportunity to quietly collect their share of chop money.

Joblessness, unretirement, and the limits of redistribution

In this article, I have tried to disentangle some of the complexities surrounding the experiences of older informal transport workers in Ghana, focusing on the roles of chop money and the economic, social, and cultural dynamics that shape their lives. My analysis has been guided by the two arguments outlined at the beginning of this article, each of which has yielded particular results: first, that chop money serves as both a vital support mechanism and a source of social and affective pressures, ultimately corroding social ties by overstraining claims to redistribution; and second, that the socio-economic conditions faced by these workers are rooted in structural inequalities and exacerbated by demographic transitions. In what follows, I reflect on the implications of my ethnography, linking their relevance to broader issues of the unemployment and unretirement of older informal workers.

The redistributive practice of chop money, central to BB’s and Raymond’s survival, illustrates the ambivalence of informal welfare mechanisms. While it offers crucial support, it is fraught with social and affective tensions, bringing recipients into subordinate positions within social and economic hierarchies and thwarting previously acquired statuses. Here, solidarity dynamics bear the potential to precipitate processes of downward social mobility, creating dependence and even forms of associative bondage.

While BB and Raymond provide rather drastic examples of the vicious cycle of unemployment, poverty, and social decline, their cases highlight broader challenges faced by ageing transport workers. Many navigate involuntary withdrawal from work due to perceived physical incapacity or unsuitability by seeking ways to accommodate their impending or actual out-of-work status. Among the most common strategies is investment in a business or capital asset, such as purchasing a bus or taxi to hire out on a commission basis, or renting out a room. However, these efforts are often hindered by significant structural constraints. Investment in vehicle ownership requires a level of savings that few transport workers can muster; and even when sufficient capital is raised through savings or borrowing, profit margins are generally low, further eroded by high running costs and intense competition in the transport sector. Similarly, renting out a room requires sufficient space and property ownership, which most transport workers have not been able to acquire, except for land purchased or inherited in rural areas, usually their hometowns, which often lies idle due to lack of resources for construction.

Support from family members, particularly children, is rarely a significant consideration. Among those with whom I have maintained close relationships – sometimes spanning over a decade and involving contact with their relatives – only few appear to rely on the support of younger family members. The vast majority refrain from seeking help, even in situations of evident financial hardship. Two factors seem especially relevant in explaining this reluctance. First is the normative expectation that men should sustain themselves throughout their working lives, rooted in gendered notions of male responsibility and a work ethic that values effort and condemns laziness. Second is the recognition of the financial hardships faced by younger kin, who themselves are regularly confronted with difficulties arising from un- and underemployment, falling income levels, and rising living costs.

An exception to this is medical expenses, particularly in emergencies, where family members are often willing to pool resources to cover necessary treatment. Another notable exception is the often close economic relationship between husbands and wives, which, among transport workers, is often integrated into the bus station economy. Many wives of drivers and station workers engage in adjacent trades, such as hawking and vending at or near the station. This dynamic reflects not only economic necessity but also broader marital arrangements in which household provisioning is negotiated and financial burdens are redistributed along gendered lines. As wives earn independent income, they help sustain the household and alleviate the pressures on their husbands, even as men often seek to maintain the appearance of being the (main) provider. The cases of BB and Raymond, as a widowed and divorced driver respectively, fall outside this form of mutual support. While the absence of a partner heightens their dependence on chop money and exacerbates their economic vulnerability, it also spares them from some financial obligations, particularly those tied to a spouse’s extended family. While this reduces certain pressures, it does little to offset their precarious financial and social standing.

Notwithstanding these particularities, the joblessness and unretirement of older informal workers in Ghana’s transport sector, as well as in other areas of unprotected economic activity across the continent, is becoming increasingly prevalent. The trend is tied directly to the structural adjustments and economic policies imposed in the 1980s and 1990s, which had a devastating impact on Ghana’s labour market and reshaped employment trajectories for an entire generation. Many of today’s ‘seniors’ began their working lives in the wake of these transformations, which, compounded by rapid urbanization, have led to shrinking opportunities for economic viability and an increasing likelihood of prolonged financial vulnerability for older informal workers.

The longer-term implications of the sweeping informalisation of the urban working population differ from the ‘demographic burden’ faced by industrialized societies with (functioning) welfare and pension systems. With a median age of 21.3 years (in 2023) – less than half that of Europe – Ghana’s population remains youthful. What the rise of urban informality is likely to result in is to put increasing strain on redistributive practices, such as the station’s chop money, increase competition over entitlements to shares, and, ultimately, bring the support capacity of work-based solidarity networks to their limits.