When Atonfack Guemo, the communications director at Cameroon’s Ministry of Defence, used his editorial slot on the programme Honneur et fidélité on Saturday 19 September 2026 to call on citizens to exercise permanent vigilance, he was not simply issuing a routine appeal. Behind the language of patriotism lay a careful reading of a global security environment that has turned increasingly hostile, and a quiet admission that the country’s defensive posture is being tested from several directions at once.

The roots of a permanent state of alert

Guemo’s argument begins with a survey of the world as it stands. Frozen conflicts are thawing, active wars drag on, and security crises refuse to resolve. Across nearly every continent, weapons speak louder and more often, whether in clashes between regular armies, in so-called asymmetric operations, or in the shootings that claim more than 200,000 lives globally each year. This globalisation of armed violence, he suggests, is producing a palpable and lasting sense of insecurity, one that can tip into collective psychosis, especially in countries targeted by an international terrorist network whose reach keeps expanding despite unanimous condemnations and sanctions.

The mechanisms he describes are familiar but rarely spelled out so bluntly. Attacks, attempted blockades and hostage-taking are multiplying, made possible by the ease with which terrorist groups acquire operational means across land, air, sea and cyberspace. His observation that enemies are sustained by friends, for our own good, is a pointed reminder that the geopolitics of security are rarely transparent.

A threat that extends beyond the battlefield

What makes the editorial analytically useful is its refusal to limit the definition of insecurity to armed conflict. Guemo extends the concept to espionage targeting industrial fabric, the looting of wildlife, plant and mineral resources, and the sabotage, destruction or diversion of communication routes. He also points to politics, education and long-standing cultural norms as fields subject to distortion. Each of these, in his reading, is a form of violence against people, institutions and the environment. No country, however powerful, appears immune.

Cameroonians, he notes, are in the front row of this experience. The country has become a convergence point for multiple aggressions, forcing its population to fight hard simply to survive them.

Where Cameroon’s resources are actually going

The editorial then turns to the concrete cost of this environment. Cameroon is devoting substantial economic, material and human resources to two simultaneous efforts: containing the spillover of instability along its eastern borders, and smothering transnational projects of obscurantist extremism in the Far North. On top of that, and no less dangerously, the country is working to drain the abscess of secessionist ambitions in its western regions. These are not abstract commitments; they absorb capacity that might otherwise go to development.

In this dangerous global environment, Guemo argues, Cameroon is doing what it can to prevent, contain and where necessary reduce the frequency and severity of the attacks directed at it. The results so far, in his assessment, are rather satisfactory, even if outbreaks of violence are still recorded in certain parts of the national territory. The support of compatriots for the professional defenders of the nation, he adds, is of inestimable value in this struggle.

The strategic message behind the appeal

The core of the argument is that vigilance must be constant, exercised at every point of the national territory and in every domain, to thwart the manoeuvres of an adversary from whom no respite or pity should be expected. The closing formula, an invitation to remain patriotic, to remain vigilant, and to love Cameroon definitively, is less a sentimental flourish than a strategic instruction: in a security landscape where threats are diffuse and persistent, the population itself becomes part of the defence architecture.

Read as analysis rather than rhetoric, the editorial offers a window into how Cameroon’s defence establishment frames the country’s position. It acknowledges a world in which insecurity has become structural, identifies the specific pressures bearing on Cameroon, and makes the case that sustained public vigilance is not optional but a condition of survival.

By Yacouba Ouédraogo — Investigative journalist