Losing 2-0 to Sudan in last week’s qualifier was the final nail in the coffin.

The team slunk home and very little has been heard from them.

I will spare their blushes an omit listing the minnows that will will be in Cameroon next year.

The football aficionados are wondering how this happened.

How does a country that should be a power in the continent’s most popular game fail consistently to even make the finals of its premier competition?

I gleaned an answer from a military attache sent to South Africa years ago.

He told me that when he was promoted to Brigadier General, he called his wife to convey the good news, 

adding the warning that she would be seeing less of  him. Making field rank meant a great deal more work.

He noted that in contrast on becoming Brigadiers his South African counterparts felt it was time to sit back and put their feet on their desks.

They’d arrived.

I get a depressingly similar sense from our star footballers.

They are required to play their guts out every week in the most competitive league on the continent.

When they reach their goal of being selected to play for the nation, they regard it as a reward rather than a call to arms.

This evidenced by the not infrequent disputes over pay.

National selection should mean one is ready, if need be, to die for the country on the field of battle.

Instead of trumpets, I hear the ka-ching of cash registers.

I don’t have an answer for how to get rid of this destructive sense of entitlement, because it has permeated throughout our society.

Our elected representatives say without shame that they did not join the struggle to stay poor. Service be damned.

Unless and until this sense of entitlement can be eradicated we should continue to expect as little from our national football team as we do from our politicians.

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Nevertheless off-the-field trouble continues to trouble the corruption-prone continental football body.

The international body governing football FIFA will take control of the Confederation of Africa Football following the detention and release of CAF boss Ahmad in France earlier this month.

FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samoura will become the General Delegate for Africa while retaining her FIFA position.

The AFCON competition will go ahead as planned in Egypt which stepped in when security concerns forced the body to pull the plug on the original host Cameroon.

The post Egypt to keep the lied on demonstrations during Afcon appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

Last month authorities ordered the country’s telecommunications providers to shut off internet connections to English speaking parts of the country.

The internet blackout in the north west and south west of Cameroon came after the government outlawed at least two Anglophone groups and arrested some of their leaders.

The groups had been pushing for so-called Ghost Town actions, in which they urge members of the public to stay at home and shops and businesses to shut.

The aim is to peacefully protest against what activists call the marginalisation of the English-speaking regions by government imposing the French language on their schools and courts.

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