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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They say they’ve driven the Islamist terrorist off  their hideouts on the islands in the giant Lake Chad.

Chad army spokesman Colonel Azem Agouna says Operation Bohoma Anger was launched after Boko Haram killed 100 of his soldiers last month.

52 Chadian soldiers died in the operation that ended earlier this week.

In addition to the 1000 Boko Haram killed, Chadian troops destroyed 52 large motorized canoes known as pirogues belonging to the terrorists. 

President Idriss Deby has visited the area.

He said it was a pity Chad was not supported by neighbors Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon against the jihadis that threaten them all.

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With close to 100 cases reported, COVID 19 is gaining a foothold on the continent that has thus far been lightest hit by the virus.

Burkina Faso’s Health Minister Claudine Lougue says the two cases of coronavirus in her country come from a woman who recently visited France.

Her husband is also infected. They are quarantines in a Ouagadougou hospital. A person who has been in close contact with her is under observation.

South Africa’s seven cases put its third on the continental list behind Egypt, which has 54 cases and Algeria with 19. Cameroon, Senegal, Togo and Nigeria have also reported cases.

Worldwide COVID 19 cases increased by 3994 yesterday, bringing the total to 109 578.

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The jihadis approached the fishing village disguised as traders.

The attack on the remote village took place before Christmas.  News of it has taken a fortnight to emerge.

Boko Haram was formed in Nigeria a decade ago and and since spread its operations in Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

The victims from last month’s attack are mainly Cameroonians but many other nationals are fishermen on Lake Chad.

An unknown number of people remain unaccounted for.

The island has a become fertile ground for terrorists because the multi-national task force charged with patrolling the area is finding it too expensive and too dangerous to cover properly. 

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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.

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He replaces South African lawyer Nicholas Haysom who was expelled by Somali authorities for questioning their legal basis for arresting opposition activists.

James Swan will have his work cut out dealing with the Mogadishu administration led by Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed.

He has spent most of his career serving in African countries undergoing complex transitions.

Swan was US Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Djibouti. He also served in Cameroon, Nicaragua and Haiti.

Haysom has been reassigned by UN boss Antonio Guterres to mediate in finding a solution between pro-democracy demonstrators and the military council that ousted Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir.

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A Cameroonian doctor working the World Health Organization had died in an attack on an EBOLA treatment centre in Butembo.

EBOLA has killed nearly 900 people in the Eastern DRC in the past nine months.

The spike in new infections this month has been the highest in this outbreak which is second largest on the planet.

Locals who feel the symptoms of the hemorrhagic disease refuse to go treatment centers, fearing they will die or be killed.

Locals have chased off foreign health workers, claiming they brought EBOLA to the DRC and are  there to make money.

Political suspicion is at fever pitch because area was excluded from the voting process last December on account of the EBOLA outbreak.

The post EBOLA outbreak surges in DRC climate of violence and suspicion appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.

Jihadists struck the bases that host units from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Troops at the two bases were overpowered and forced to withdraw, leaving the terrorists to carry off  guntrucks, ammunition and multiple rocket launchers.

Boko Haram tried unsuccessfully to overrun a third base to which the troops withdrew. 

The troops avoided risking  ambush by not pursuing the withdrawing Boko Haram fighters.

Nigerian reinforcements backed by fighter jets are in pursuit of the jihadi  fighters.

The area is a stronghold of the terrorist Islamic State West Africa Province being battled by trop[s from Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

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They’re trying to stop trafficking in the African ant-eater species whose scales are highly prized in Chinese medicine.

More than 3 000 pangolins would have had to be killed to provide the scales set alight by Malaysian officials.

They were confiscated from major anti-trafficking operations this past year.

Authorities have contacted the governments of South Africa, Cameroon and Ghana from which the pangolins originated.

Malaysia’s become major transit point in moving the grizzly goods to China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

Pangolins are one of the most trafficked species.

Under threat they roll into a ball allowing the poachers simply to lift it and put it in a bag.

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European rescuers reached them after they’d spent hours in the water — too late to prevent a number of deaths.

The migrants were packed into two rubber boats that were wrecked.

One of them suffered engine failure and the other began to deflate.

They came from Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Algeria and Egypt.

Medicines Sans Frontiers provided help to the survivors who clung to floating wreckage.

They included pregnant women, children and babies – 

some of whom suffered serious chemical burns from petrol in the water.

The organization says some of the the migrants are returned to detention camps in Libya where they are held in deplorable conditions.

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