Thirty years ago renown Ugandan playwright Alex Mukulu staged the play 30 Years of Bananas, to rave reviews and full houses. It was a satirical look at where Uganda had come from, and the main players who had influenced the fortunes of the country.
His main protagonist was an immigrant that he used to tell Uganda’s story, and how all the excitement and expectations the country had at Independence did not exactly come true. Who was to blame?
Mukulu used soccer as a metaphor of Uganda’s fortunes, and the different players that took to the field to play the game of nations. Some scored penalties, others missed, and some missed the ball altogether. The play tackles the thorny issues of tribalism, economic inequalities, electoral malpractices, poor leadership, dictatorship and the handover of power from one president to another. The biggest question was, what had Ugandans done over the 30 years of independence to warrant any celebration?
Uganda in 1992, when the play was first staged, was a different place. The economy had just started to recover from decades of decline, as indeed the country itself. There was a lot of optimism that life was going to get better for the ordinary person, and audiences could afford to laugh at all the antics on stage.
But 30 years later, in the words made famous in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!”
As Uganda celebrates its 61st independence anniversary, is there much to laugh about? In 1992, Uganda’s population was about 19m, with GDP per capita of 151USD. 30 years later, the population has exploded to almost 50m, and the GDP per capita is now 934.90 USD.
While household poverty rates have declined from 19.7% in 2013 to 8.4% by 2020, a report by the Alliance for Finance Monitoring, a non-government organization, revealed that a Ugandan Government a country-wide survey carried out in 2019 showed that 68.9% of Ugandans were outside the money economy. That basically meant that more than half the population of Uganda was living hand-to-mouth.
Th report further revealed that the government’s poverty alleviation programs had a pattern of being designed and implemented in periods leading up to elections; or even in the middle of the electioneering period.
There have been several of these programs, including Entandikwa (1990s), Bona Bagaggawale (2007), Operation Wealth Creation (2013), the Youth Capital Venture that later became Youth Livelihood Programme (2013) and Emyooga (2020).
All these programs were behest with poor implementation, inflated administrative costs, bureaucratic tape, nepotism and financial illiteracy among intended beneficiaries. But the biggest problem has been the now institutionalized corruption within government agencies.
Corruption has been named as the single biggest problem that Ugandans of all walks of life face on a daily basis. Repeated government declarations to fight have come to naught, and very few Ugandans, if any, believe that the government has any vested interests in fighting corruption.
Mixed messages from the President have not helped, the repeated vows to get rid of corruption notwithstanding. When the Inspector General of Government, tasked with fighting corruption in the public sector, declared an intention to carry out a lifestyle audit on all public employees, the President told her off.
Ironically, it was at the launch of the lifestyle audit programs in 2021 that President Museveni advised the IGG to go slow in its implementation. He said that while the lifestyle audit was good, “…be careful because we are still lucky that our corrupt people are corrupt here. But if they realize that their lifestyle is being audited, they will instead take what they stole abroad and it will be hard to track them.”
The net effect was that up to now the much-vaunted lifestyle audit is yet to take off. Then in his address to the nation on the eve of the 61st independence anniversary, the President called on Ugandans to report any corrupt people to the State House anti-corruption team. He thus bypassed the institution that is supposed to fight corruption.
Uganda is rated as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, with the Transparency International's 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index ranking it 142nd out of 180 countries. Kenya was ranked 123rd, Rwanda 54th and Tanzania 94th. Only Somalia (180th) and South Sudan (178th) were ranked worse in the region.
By comparison South Africa was 72nd, Nigeria 152nd, and Ghana 72nd.
If Mukulu was to re-stage his play this year, what would he call it? With corruption at an all-time high, and becoming institutionalized, there might be no bananas to speak of. So, 60 years with no bananas?