Open letter to Iya Mohamed

By Douglas A. Achingale in Yaounde

Big brother Iya, no one can be oblivious of the immense contribution that you and your team at the Cameroon Football Federation (FECAFOOT) have made to propel Cameroon football to great heights. You came to the fore in 1998 like a veritable messiah, given the scandalous circumstances under which your predecessor, Vincent Onana, quit the scene. And a messiah indeed you proved to be in the years that followed. For in 2000 and 2002, the Indomitable Lions wrote some of the best lines in their history, clinching three major trophies, viz; two Africa Cup of Nations (2000 and 2002) and one Olympic gold medal (2000).

However, those victories did not seem to have helped you and Cameroon football in the long run. They made you think thereafter that you had done so much for our football and that it was time for you to start “reaping the fruits of your labour.” They fuelled the flames of your unexplained hubris and actuated you to view every other person like midgets whose opinions must not count. And so, like an inebriated doofus, you have, to quote Bate Besong, “inexorably moved from one folly to even greater lacunae.”

Mr. President, what do you tell yourself when you take a look down the road and see the string of incredulous lacklustre performances of our once mythical Lions, which persistent dismal output has been owing to your inability – or is it refusal – to create an enabling working environment for the team?  

Hidden agenda to destroy Cameroon football

Of the avalanche of coaches you have recruited at different times to train the Lions, the two most inspiring were Pierre Lechantre and Artur Jorge. But the disdainful manner in which you showed Lechantre the gateway, despite his brilliance with the squad in Ghana and Nigeria in 2000, and the shabby treatment you gave Jorge, which led to his untimely resignation, are telltale signs that you might after all have a hidden agenda to perpetrate the irreversible decline of Cameroon football!

This thesis enjoys a strong backing when one looks at the uninspiring personalities of the other coaches and the controversial circumstances under which some of them were selected. These are Winfried Schaffer, Arie Haan, Otto Pfister, Paul Le Guen, Javier Clemente and Dénis Lavagne.

Cameroonians, as much as I understand, can forgive you after all for appointing all of the above except the overly insipid and phlegmatic Lavagne who holds the record as the most amateurish and inconsequential trainer the Indomitable Lions have ever had. Of course, you know only too well that your appointment of the Frenchman was based on subjective and selfish motives rather than anything else. Otherwise, why is it that at a time when we were in dire need of a truly talented and experienced technician to help take our football out of the doldrums in which it currently finds itself, you so invidiously settled for a “coach” with a CV as blank as the womb of a virgin!

Immediately you gave your reasons for selecting this former trainer of your club, Cotonsport Garoua, to coach the Lions, as being his availability in the country and his acceptance of a meagre monthly salary, I knew, for sure, that you were preparing, willy-nilly, to drive the final nail into the coffin of our football. Everybody could see that you were no longer useful to Cameroon football because you were leaving the substance and chasing the shadow.

High-handedness, your flagship trait

You heard how Cameroonians protested violently when they got wind of your intention to appoint Lavagne. But in your characteristic high-handed manner, you stood your grounds and went ahead to give him the high-profile job. Now that the Frenchman has proved not to be equal to the task, how do you justify your decision to appoint him coach of the national team? That the fact of him residing in Cameroon and receiving a paltry pay package has paid off?

Talking about your high-handedness, Mr. President, it was not only on the occasion of the selection of Lavagne that you exhibited it. It has been your flagship trait for many years running. In 2010, for instance, when the Lions made a catastrophic outing at the South Africa World Cup, there was a general consensus for an autopsy to be made publicly so that the squabbles and other intractable problems in the team that engendered the dismal performance could be brought to the fore and laid to rest once and for all.

But you chose to ignore Cameroonians and kept everything under wraps. You fudged the issue and by so doing planned to fail in future competitions as we are witnessing today. You took 20 million Cameroonians for whom football is like a religion for a ride and obfuscated things for them at a time when they most badly needed clarifications on the state of their football. It was indeed unfathomable that the president of an FA that you are returned from a competition of that magnitude with such disastrous results and refused to grant even a single interview to the media to explain what had transpired.

As though that was not sufficient, you and your cohorts literally trampled on the rights of players of the national team during their friendly tournament in Marakech, Morocco late last year. And when Cameroon’s most reliable soccer star of the moment, Samuel Eto’o Fils, cried foul, you peremptorily slammed him an eight-month ban.

Whether you like it or not, the consequence of your action is the disgrace the team received in the hands of little-known Cape Verde on 8 September and the possibility of our non-qualification for next year’s Cup of Nations.

Eto’o’s image towers high

Mr. President, how on earth did you think that after humiliating Eto’o in such screwy and preposterous fashion, he would so easily accept an invitation to rejoin the team? Again, whether you like it or not, the Anzhi Makhachkala marksman is not an ordinary player that can be led by the nose like an ass! By virtue of his outstanding achievements on the pitch, and being one of the country’s foremost ambassadors abroad, he has a mammoth personality that warrants him some preferential treatment. Even in Heaven, not everyone has the same status; there is someone who is seated at the right hand of God the Father!

I remember that when Eto’o turned down the invitation to go to camp ahead of the Cameroon-Cape Verde first leg game, you told CRTV, with undisguised equanimity, that that did not bother you, for some other players had done same and it did not quite affect the performance of the Lions. Today, I hear you and Sport and Physical Education minister, Adoum Garoua, are making special negotiations with the superstar for him to play the second leg match. Don’t you think, Mr. President, that most of the decisions you make in your capacity as the FECAFOOT boss are full of holes? Don’t you think your ideas have become frumpy over the years?

Resign Mr. President!

I know that you are feeling so complacent and doing all what you are doing because you know you are unimpeachable given the FA’s autonomous status. But do you want to destroy everything before you go unscathed? How do you want to be remembered? As the one who annihilated Cameroon football?     

Don’t you think it is time for you to resign? Come to think of it. Most Cameroonians no longer want you at the helm of FECAFOOT and they have made it a daily public outcry. There are other glaring signs that your time is up, one of them being the fact that the club of which you are president, Cotonsport, is losing the hegemony it has had for years over other clubs of our local elite championship. Isn’t this a clear signal that the ground under your feet is giving way? And that it is high time you left that office?

There is a local adage which goes thus: when the finger stays for too long in the anus, it comes out with shit. Mr. Iya, you have stayed for too long as FECAFOOT president and what you are now coming out with is not only faeces but one that is overly putrid.

To quote another poet, “go ye away, you have erred!”

*The author is a Yaounde-based critic, social worker and free thinker.