Internet shutdowns, facial recognition, state debt: Africa’s surveillance boom 🎥

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In the first two episodes of this series, we mapped a system. Your smartphone continuously generates data that companies monetize, that brokers resell, and that algorithms convert into predictions about your behavior. The system is vast, discreet, and deeply embedded in the global digital economy.

But private companies aren’t the only actors interested in your data. There is another, equipped with powers no commercial platform has: the state. It can legislate, monitor, mandate — and, when it decides, cut.

In this episode, we examine what governments do with digital data. And we start where the reality is most concrete: in Yaoundé.

Cameras on city walls 📷

In 2014, the Cameroonian government launched what it called the Cameroon Intelligent City Project. Seventy CCTV cameras supplied by Chinese tech giant Huawei were installed across six localities. The official narrative was public safety: fight crime, reduce road accidents, modernize law enforcement.

Ten years later, the project has changed scale.

In August 2019, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute inaugurated in Yaoundé an 800-square-meter national command center for video surveillance, capable of processing real-time footage from 2,000 cameras deployed across ten cities. In 2023, Douala joined the network with a similar center equipped with live facial recognition. By December 2025, according to analysis by the China-Global South Project, the Cameroonian government’s borrowing for these initiatives had reached $270 million, including $70 million directly from China CITIC Bank. The stated ambition: 24,000 cameras nationwide.

On the streets of Yaoundé, the gaze of the state is now technological, permanent, and connected to a command center the public has never seen from the inside.

Security as pretext 🎭

The problem with surveillance systems isn’t their existence — it’s their use. And the line between a public safety tool and a political control instrument is, across Africa as elsewhere, dangerously thin.

Cameroon provided a particularly chilling illustration of this. In January 2023, journalist Martinez Zogo was abducted in Yaoundé and found dead, his body bearing signs of torture. The city was already equipped with hundreds of surveillance cameras. Yet, according to journalists and local observers cited by Biometric Update, no footage from this network was ever made public in connection with the investigation. Cameras everywhere. Images for no one — or rather, images reserved for those who control the system.

In Uganda, Huawei technicians were accused — per a Wall Street Journal investigation widely cited across multiple sources — of helping security services monitor opposition figure Bobi Wine and his supporters using a $126 million facial recognition camera network. In Zambia, similar methods were reportedly deployed against opposition bloggers. Huawei denied the allegations, but the structural problem remains: once the infrastructure is in place, the public has no way of knowing when crime control becomes opposition control.

In Kenya, the youth-led protests of 2024 and 2025, organized through social media and mobile money, were met with digital repression. Amnesty International documented that authorities and allied groups used online intimidation, disinformation and surveillance to suppress the movement. The toll: at least 128 deaths, more than 3,000 arrests, over 83 enforced disappearances. The same digital networks that helped citizens organize gave the state a precise map of mobilization.

Internet shutdowns: the ultimate weapon ✂️

Real-time surveillance is one form of control. But African states have developed another, more radical tool: cutting off internet access entirely.

In 2024, Africa set an all-time record with 21 internet shutdowns across 15 countries — the highest figure ever documented for the continent in a single year, according to an Access Now report published in February 2025. In Tanzania, on election day, October 29, 2025, a nationwide outage cut all online communication, raising fundamental questions about electoral transparency. In Senegal, in February 2024, connectivity was severed during an electoral dispute, plunging millions into digital silence.

In Cameroon itself, according to multiple sources including Allafrica, connectivity was significantly disrupted during the October 2025 presidential election.

What these shutdowns reveal is fundamental: telecom operators — whether state-owned or private — are subject to government authority. When a state orders a shutdown, operators comply, often not out of agreement but under threat of license revocation. Your data flows through infrastructure you didn’t choose, managed by actors you don’t control, under the authority of states whose intentions you can’t always know.

In 2025, according to Technext, government-imposed internet shutdowns across Africa cost the continent $1.12 billion in economic losses.

The uncomfortable question: who really controls the infrastructure? 🔑

There is a dimension of the debate on African state surveillance that rarely gets addressed directly. A significant share of the continent’s digital infrastructure — telecom networks, data centers, video surveillance systems — has been built, financed, and in some cases managed by foreign actors, primarily Chinese.

In Cameroon, Huawei is the technical partner for the Intelligent City project via Camtel, the state-owned operator. A Camtel representative, speaking anonymously at the 2019 command center inauguration and cited by ITWeb Africa, noted that Chinese engineers remain on-site after installations to manage the infrastructure. A national data center — the Zamengoe Data Center, built near Yaoundé — was also financed by a Chinese government loan and equipped by Huawei.

The question isn’t about any particular actor’s intentions. It’s structural: when a country’s data infrastructure is built, financed, and operated by a foreign government or its companies, where does sovereignty over that data actually reside? Who has access to what, under what conditions, and with what guarantees?

According to a recent survey cited in a report on AI and repression in Africa, only 38% of African citizens surveyed knew their governments had acquired biometric, facial recognition, or AI systems. State digital surveillance is therefore deploying in near-total opacity for the majority of those subject to it.

What this changes for you 🧭

The earlier episodes of this series described primarily economic risks: being profiled for targeted advertising, paying a higher price for a plane ticket. The stakes of state surveillance are of a different order.

They concern your ability to speak, to organize, to move through public space without being identified. They touch the question of whether your private communications are actually private. They ask what freedom means in a public space where every corner is potentially filmed, analyzed, and archived.

These are not abstract questions. They arise today, concretely, in the streets of Yaoundé and Douala. And they call for — at minimum — a citizen awareness that adoption figures suggest is still far from widespread.

In the next episode, we move away from institutional actors — companies and governments — to examine a third category: predators. Those with no legal mandate and no declared business model, but who pursue your data with an effectiveness that official actors might envy.

💬 Join the conversation: Were you aware of the surveillance camera network in Yaoundé and Douala? Do you think these technologies genuinely improve security, or do they primarily serve as control tools? The conversation is open.

This article is part of What You’re Worth, TechGriot’s series on the personal data economy.