The Inevitability of the Banana Republic

Image courtesy Bloomberg

• by Prof Sasanka Perera 
• - on 08/29/2015 

Sri Lanka has been a ‘banana republic,’ for quite some time, and clearly so throughout the oligarchy of the Rajapaksas. Formally, a banana republic is “a small country that is economically dependent on a single export commodity, such as bananas, and is typically governed by a dictator or the armed forces.”[1] But in our case, the fate of the citizenry is far worse than in most other banana republics. In Sri Lanka, all wisdom, action, dreams, hallucinations and the making of unmitigated profit came from the first family and then from its acolytes. 

The Inevitability of the Banana Republic by Thavam Ratna