How could it be that Ugandan players are so afraid of undergoing surgeries!

This column has previously detailed how Hassan Badru Zziwa's sports anecdotes (and they never seem to be in scant supply!) held the rapt attention of the newsrooms he sensibly and perceptively filed his stories. What your columnist did not quite disclose was that the depictions have, for the most part, a funny edge to them.

Like a spellbinding performer with a knack for stagecraft and a catalogue to match, Zziwa has subtlety and intelligence that hardly yields to overemphases and simplifications. Instead, he builds skilfully to a climax. 

While the tales the veteran journalist has made a habit of telling are not quite the kind many would enjoy with their favourite drink in hand as they watch the pink-orange sunset over the marina, they teem with prescient warnings regardless. 

Your columnist recalls a meticulous rendering that poked fun at a superstition that was rife at Villa Park. Despite, or in fact because, outsized pleasures assumed ridiculous levels of import at the home of SC Villa, senior management was keen on insulating their players from injuries.

To pull this off, Uganda's most successful club reawakened its strong interest in the occult. Per Zziwa, players' knees were marginally, if not meticulously, slit open and stuffed with the medieval forerunner of chemistry—juju. A lizard's tail particularly came up for mention and reference with instructive regularity. 

The players were also led to believe that surgeries, undoubtedly one of the wonders of modern science, are expendable. A knee surgery will slow you down considerably, players were told in no uncertain terms. The players heard, and you cannot say they paid no heed.

The trickle-down effect of an aversion to go under the knife, extraordinary though it now seems, persists. It is in fact cited warily, perhaps defensively.

In 2019, Muhammad Shaban returned to Uganda after Morocco's Raja Casablanca deemed him surplus to requirements. The striker reportedly refused to undergo an operation after scans spotlighted a long-standing knee problem. The doctor’s recommendation was pretty clear, but the injured striker was having none of it.

Interestingly, Shaban underwent the surgery anyway albeit when he was on the books of Vipers SC. Clearly a yard off the pace and less sharp in an opponent’s box nowadays, the jury appears settled on the verdict that the striker's best days are behind him. Aged just 25, this, if confirmed, would be a desperately sad outcome by any measure.

Yet there is every indication that lightning will continue to strike twice in our banana republic. Just this week, another reminder that Ugandan football may be missing something came when Allan Okello agreed to shred his contract with Algeria's Paradou AC. While Okello's failure to showcase considerable staying power in the cauldron of North Africa will be a brutal rebuke to Ugandan footballers, there is more to glean from the 23-year-old playmaker's travails. 

Sure, Okello has mirrored the likes of Milton Karisa, Nelson Senkatuka, Joel Madondo, Patrick Kaddu, and others in being knocked sideways by North African club football. There is also the small matter that Ugandan football’s wunderkind reportedly opted not to undergo surgery on a troublesome knee. 

Make of it whatever you can, but there has to be unanimity that this outcome is sad, mad and bad. Failure to grasp the gravity of a situation whose roots are, perhaps, historically deep will have adverse effects. Ugandan football cannot continue to be riven by problems brought on by an absence of basic information. Not in this digital age, for crying out loud!