The Akwaya town crier went round on the early morning of December 16, 2017, reminding the few youth still around about what had been announced the day before. The military officers who “generously” shared rice “avec les asticots” to the population recently had informed the youth earlier on that the Presidency of the Republic had instructed that Akwaya youth be recruited into the army, into the gendarmerie and the police. They did claim that the Presidency has finally discovered sadly and belatedly that there were few Akwaya youth in those corps, and that that undoubtedly explained why the people of Akwaya were so skeptical about the presence of members of the said corps and their pronouncements. It was high time the obstacle was removed by correcting the injustice. Therefore have they been empowered to conduct special recruitment of Akwaya youth into the corps in question. …
What a contradictory compassionate message from the very military still holding a list of the youth to be shot and killed on sight! Be the situation as it may, the latest information is that a few youth did take them seriously and reported to the officers as invited: the exact number still unknown… What beats the imagination, however, is that, for his eleven years in parliament, Ayah did represent to the government that, to the best of his knowledge, information and belief, there had been, since 1961, less than ten persons from Akwaya in the police force, fewer than eight in the army, and not more than five in the gendarmerie. Even as Ayah decried the injustice from tree-tops, pointing out that such imbalance was inimical to the people’s sense of belonging, his plea was flatly ignored. He was rather taken for a rebel instead. That was when Cameroun was still labouring under the contagious lizard’s self-praising of being “an island of peace in a turbulent sea”.
The tides have since changed, and Cameroun is now more like a lake of turbulence in a land of tranquility. But seriously speaking, how would anyone convince anyone else that, in hostile times like now, tribalism, greed and rejection have instead given way to goodwill and honesty from the Camerounese Government? Besides, has it ever been heard that a government would recruit and train terrorist/enemies in warfare against that same government? Or is it that, for the first time in history, human beings are going to train dogs/rats how to use weapons, especially “weapons of mass destruction”?
SUFFOCATING ABERRATION INDEED!
How can one, in the circumstance, hesitate to deduce then that this is just one more trap for the youth? Or put it simply that the end does justify the means, after all?
No me oh! Ah no deh me dere!
MAKWO!
Justice Ayah Paul Abine