Let’s cut the umbilical cords that connect us to a Banana Republic

The term Banana Republic is pejorative. However, some pejorative terms have a grain of truth in them. American fugitive writer William Sidney Porter in his novel Cabbages and Kings coined the term Banana Republic. In political science, the term has come to mean a small, unstable, and highly stratified county ruled by an oligarchy or plutocracy. It originally referred to Honduras, then under the thumb of United Fruit Company, an American multinational, which worked in cahoots with the corrupt, servile elite to fleece the country. The “banana” in the republic is over-reliance on large-scale plantation agriculture in bananas for export. Which begs the question – is it fair to describe Kenya as a Banana Republic? Is it a deserved insult?