Marking Fifty Years of Corruption?

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda

PLAYWRIGHT Alex Mukulu’s 1990s ‘Thirty Years of Bananas’ was a scorching critique of the first turbulent decades of independent Uganda. If he considered another play on the country’s political history, today the prolific dramatist wouldn’t miss the theme of a festering corruption Uganda chokes on.

This year in October, Uganda will be 50 years as an independent nation. Back then when Mukulu scripted the play, his main thrust was on the madness the country suffered! His story acted out to show a failed dream of independence, thanks to rogue regimes that had taken turn at the helm of the government, one forcefully after another.

In his choicest depiction of common bananas, he sought to show the ‘nothing’ that independence seemed to have turned out. Symbiotic also, he meant Ugandans had gone “bananas” – mad – welcoming one worse dictator after the exit of a terrible one.