Many Yaoundeans are observing with understandable curiosity some new gadgets put up at principal points and passage ways around the city.

The one at the Central Post Office square is a veritable centre of attraction. But these gadgets are far from simple decorations to give the city a more modern look, especially as many people tend to believe that they are a mere carry-over of the festive yuletide and new year periods when the city was heavily decorated with flowers and other beautifying gadgets.

In fact, they are surveillance machines put up at the instance of the Yaounde City Council working in tandem with several other partners. The aim of the initiative is to check crime and ensure a follow up of activity especially in areas of huge human concentration which are often prone to crime. A few knowledgeable citizens are complaining about these instruments because they claim they are a brazen infringement of privacy and even human rights. To an extent, they may be right; but considered in the context of the immensity of urban crime and the necessity to check it, the initiative can only be most timely.

The security agencies have often had a difficult time tracing or trailing pick-pockets in big squares, limited as they have often been, by their inability to trace these criminals because of the absence of required technical equipment which can help reconstitute these crimes. Aspects related to the violation of privacy are important, but the determination to make our city centres safer seems to be a shared concern.

Moreover, in many different parts of the world, especially in the developed countries, surveillance equipment are in common use and are generally found in every available space used by several people at the same time such as parks, shopping malls, bus or train stations, airports, cinema halls, classrooms and even churches.

The Yaounde City Council initiative should therefore be seen more as a contribution to checking insecurity than as an attempt to undermine the citizens’ right to privacy. This said, such an action must also be in conformity with existing laws and regulations such that no innocent or well-intentioned citizen should feel disturbed by such an innovation that is simply responding to modern world trends.