This research argues that neoliberalist policies enforced by state and customary leaders as a means of domestic and foreign investments in land is deepening inequality, increasing vulnerability of peasant farmers and increasing poverty in rural Ashanti. Based on Marxian primitive accumulation, land which in traditional African culture and specifically Ashanti is “beloved” and belonging to the past, present and future generations has become privatized, financialized and redistributed to shift ownership to the wealthy elites and organizations often in line with state regulations. At best, the elites including chiefs and state agencies hybridize the land market to create loopholes and exploit the system to their advantage. Instead of chiefs serving as custodians of land in trust for their subjects, they now claim or assert ownership of land without any accountability mechanisms to subjects whose primary source of livelihood is threatened. In pre-colonial Ashanti land was not sold in perpetuity but given to peasant groups through families and kinship groups to work on for their livelihoods. Such groups only took the land from the chiefs and paid drink money and some material gifts or paltry monies as gratitude. However, in the light of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, formalization and the commercialization of land through cadastral mapping and land titling have greatly shifted the land market from customary and communal land ownership to individual adjudication. From a Harveyian perspective, since the peasant farmers do not have titles to the land, once the wealthy class go through the state legal process it is not recorded at the land commission that the land is already owned by the peasantry. Consequently, lands are sold to private investors at the expense of the poor rural folks some of whom are forced into waged-labour. Capitalism’s insatiable quest for profit has driven customary authorities into the neoliberal arena preferring selling communal lands to private entities and individuals than to peasants who only provide drinks and a token money for land acquisition. As such there is a situation of ‘development of underdevelopment’ at the rural areas given the case of Adumanu, a rural community in the Ashanti region of Ghana.