A philanthropic outfit, the Ayah Foundation, which is fronted by son of former supreme court deputy attorney general, Ayah Paul Abine, was on Friday prevented from donating food items and other personal effects to detainees at the Bamenda central prison who were arrested within the context of the Anglophone crisis.
The executive head of the Ayah Foundation, Ayah Ayah Abine, told The Guardian Post yesterday that their application for authorisation to visit and donate to the prisoners in Bamenda was
out rightly rejected.
He said the Bamenda central prison
superintendent ordered them to instead
seek authorisation from the ministry of
justice in Yaounde before they could be
allowed to carry out their charity gesture.
Ayah Ayah narrated to this reporter that
his request to visit the Bamenda central
prison inmates was handed to the prison
authorities well ahead of time but he was
shocked to be told that the request was
not granted only when he and his team
had showed up at the prison premises
with the stock of items to be donated.
“We were utterly embarrassed when
the prison authorities told us upon our
arrival that we were not going to have
access to the inmates. They said we
should go back to Yaounde and get
authoritisation from the ministry of jus-
tice before coming to Bamenda. We wait-
ed at the prison yard for 48 hours thinking
the authorities were going to change their
mind but they didn’t,” -Ayah Ayah Abine
told this reporter by telephone yesterday.
“We are aware that these detainees are
living under dire conditions and acts like
this one cannot deter us from reaching out
to them” he stated.
Ayah said given the difficult situation
they were faced with, they couldn’t return
to Yaounde with the purchased items.
“We had to devise another way to ensure
that the items reached the detainees” he said, before revealing that "we had to
get in contact with some members of a
religious group who accepted to take the
items to the beneficiaries.”
The Ayah Foundation, it should be
said, is a philanthropic organisation.
Lately, it has been donating to victims
suffering the aching effects of the ongo-
ing Anglophone crisis.
Apart from reaching out to
Anglophone detainees at the Buea and
Yaounde central prisons with essential
items, the Ayah Foundation has also been
footing medical bills of some victims of
the unrest in the North West and South
West regions.
The foundation plans to make a trip to
Nigeria next month to extend its largesse
to the thousands of Anglophone refugees,
mostly from Akwaya and other Manyu
villages, who have fled to the neighbour-
ing country as a result of the social strife
in their communities imposed by reported
excesses of the military.
