Yaoundé: Foreign football team wins Championship
It was all happiness when PWD Bamenda won yesterday’s final to clench the trophy that has eluded it for 43 years.
The happiness following the victory did not leave many analysts indifferent. PWD Bamenda is a team in the newly minted country of Ambazonia and for more than five years, there have been bloody fighting and killings in the two English-speaking regions of the country which had declared their independence some five years ago.
The comedy was all the more comic when natives of the new country showed up with placards bearing the most irrational demands.
“We need a stadium in Bamenda,” some of the placards read. It was like a child demonstrating in front of a neighbor’s house for school fees when the child had clearly told the neighbor he had nothing in common with the neighbor.
Maybe the message was for Ambazonian leaders who all live abroad. Bringing that message to Yaoundé is like addressing the wrong audience and PWD Bamenda supporters were clearly wearing Ambazonian colors as if they had a plan to provoke the Yaoundé government.
If the people of Bamenda really need a stadium, will it not be appropriate for them to send that message to Dr. Sako Ikome and the multitude of Ambazonian generals who are living out of their own country?
It is obvious that Yaoundé will just be smiling. The people of Bamenda who have seen the worst violence over the last five years are simply tired of the violence that has been brought to them by their own people.
They seem to have counted on a Washington-based government that simply includes the poorest and most crooked pastors God has ever put on the face of the earth.
The PWD victory and the messages taken to Yaoundé might just be heralding the end of a violent struggle which is currently struggling.
If the messages were actually intended for the Yaoundé government, then the people of Bamenda are clearly flogging a dead horse as the Biya government has not got any appetite to develop infrastructure in a part of the world where the people have a mercurial temperament and can ruin everything in a feat of anger.
By Fon Lawrence in Bamenda