By Guy Feugap, Africa Organizer for World BEYOND War, Corruption Tracker, September 13, 2026
When corruption scandals erupt in the arms trade, attention focuses on the millions embezzled, the officials implicated, and the ensuing legal proceedings. Yet the true cost of these cases often runs much deeper. Behind opaque contracts and illicit commissions lie consequences that directly affect governance, citizens’ trust in their institutions, and, above all, the security of the population. The Defex case, which brought to light corrupt practices in arms contracts between Spain and Cameroon, offers an opportunity to question a security model based on the accumulation of weapons. The Cameroonian case shows that corruption in the arms trade undermines public finances and jeopardizes human security; it thus raises a fundamental question: Can lasting peace truly be built on the foundations of militarism?
In the arms deals between Spain and Cameroon, a financial scandal has implicated high-ranking officials in the Cameroonian government, as documented by Corruption Tracker, which released the report Defex’s Dirty Decades: Arms Sales to Cameroon in September 2025. The Defex affair, portrayed as an international corruption scandal, goes beyond the scope of mere financial fraud to illustrate the abuses that can arise from relying on weapons to ensure human security. Defex S.A. was a company majority-owned by the Spanish government, tasked with promoting exports of defense and security equipment. Between 1999 and 2013, it entered into a series of contracts with the Cameroonian government worth at least 103 million euros for the supply of ships, military vehicles, coastal surveillance systems, radars, riot control equipment, bulletproof vests, small arms, and ammunition. According to investigations conducted by Spanish authorities, these contracts were facilitated by a system of kickbacks, through a network of shell companies through which more than 14.6 million euros allegedly passed under the guise of consulting services in order to pay intermediaries and fund kickbacks intended for several public officials.
The case led to a wide-ranging investigation by the Spanish anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, which began in 2014 and was later expanded to include several countries where Defex operated. The company was dissolved in 2017 and liquidated in 2022. In 2023, a Spanish court convicted Defex’s former sales director, Manuel Iglesias-Sarriá, as well as the head of Aresa Marine, of corruption in international business transactions. Cameroonian journalist Mimi Mefo reports that in 2023, Cameroon’s Special Criminal Court sentenced former Minister of Defense Edgard Alaij Mebe Ngo’o to 30 years in prison after finding him guilty of overbilling military equipment contracts totaling 23.9 billion CFA (about 36.4 million euros). He was charged with embezzlement of public funds, aggravated money laundering, and corruption. The Defex case highlights that defense contracts are a hotbed of corruption due to the secrecy surrounding them and the substantial sums of money involved. We therefore aim to understand, by examining the situation in Cameroon, how these practices affect public governance, citizens’ trust, and the security of the population.
Since 2012, Cameroon has been operating in a severely deteriorated security environment. The country is simultaneously facing several armed and humanitarian crises: the Boko Haram insurgency in the Far North Region, the armed conflict in the Northwest and Southwest Regions, the consequences of persistent instability in the neighboring Central African Republic, as well as growing challenges related to cross-border crime and forced population displacement. This accumulation of crises has profoundly transformed the government’s priorities, making security one of the main areas of public intervention. Since the early 2010s, Cameroon’s military spending has risen sharply as a result of operations, making security one of the government’s largest areas of expenditure.
The quantifiable impact of these crises is constantly evolving. The report Gender Conflict Analysis in Cameroon (2020) by WILPF Cameroon highlights that these conflicts have gradually plunged Cameroon into a situation of chronic violence, characterized by a rise in human rights violations, a decline in trust between citizens and public institutions, and a deepening of social divisions. While each crisis has its own causes, they produce converging effects: massive population displacement, the collapse of social services, a slowdown in economic activity, and the increasing militarization of conflict management. The human toll is considerable. According to data compiled by the United Nations and cited in the report, Cameroon already had nearly 977,000 internally displaced persons as of April 2020, as well as 354,328 people who had returned to their communities, while violence linked to Boko Haram alone had caused approximately 300,000 internally displaced persons and 140,000 refugees in the Far North region. To this day, these populations often live in precarious conditions, with limited access to healthcare, drinking water, education, and livelihoods. The education sector is a particularly telling example of the human cost of this insecurity. In the English-speaking regions, 90% of public elementary schools and 77% of public secondary schools were closed by the end of 2019 due to the conflict. As a result, thousands of children were deprived of their fundamental right to education, while schools, teachers, and students became direct targets of violence, frequently kidnapped and killed. Figures from Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) as of June 30, 2025, show that Cameroon remained one of the major humanitarian crises in Central Africa: 969,000 internally displaced persons, 699,500 people who had returned to their communities, and 431,000 refugees and asylum seekers hosted in the country. In total, more than 2.1 million people were directly affected by forced displacement.
Economically, the conflicts have also led to the destruction of infrastructure, looting, and business closures, particularly in the Northwest and Southwest regions, which have historically been among the country’s most dynamic. Movement restrictions, military operations, so-called “ghost town” days, and constant insecurity have sharply reduced investment, disrupted supply chains, and exacerbated unemployment. In this context, the government’s response has focused on strengthening military capabilities. Conflict analysis has shown that this approach has failed to provide a lasting solution to the root causes of these conflicts. This reality highlights a paradox: while security spending increases in response to crises, the basic needs of the population (social protection, health care, education, employment, and justice) remain largely unmet.
Corruption in Cameroon is a major obstacle to development in many public sectors. The 2024 report by the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC) on the fight against corruption in Cameroon reveals that the government lost more than 4 billion CFA francs (about 6.1 million euros) to corruption during the year, and 114 billion CFA francs (about 173.8 million euros) in 2023. According to the Cameroon Tribune newspaper, this figure falls far short of the reality, as corruption is rarely reported, and the daily hardships faced by Cameroonians serve as proof of this. Data Cameroon reports much higher figures, estimating that corruption in Cameroon results in nearly 400 billion CFA francs (about 609.8 million euros) lost annually by the government, a scourge that directly undermines social development and keeps the country ranked 142nd globally on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. In reality, Cameroon scored 26 out of 100 on the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index. Cameroon’s Corruption Index averaged 23.40 points from 1996 to 2025, reaching a record high of 27 points in 2014.
The Defex case demonstrates that when corruption affects the arms trade, its consequences are particularly severe. Defense contracts involve enormous sums of money and are subject to a high level of confidentiality that eludes public scrutiny. As a result, certain individuals have enriched themselves while public finances have suffered. The defense sector is one of the most vulnerable to corruption due to its lack of transparency. Thus, corruption in arms procurement directly undermines human security. In Cameroon, where needs in education, health care, social protection, access to water, justice, and infrastructure development remain immense, every public resource that is misappropriated represents a lost opportunity to invest in the foundations of lasting peace.
That is why there is an urgent need to rethink the very concept of security, which is all too often reduced to a state’s ability to acquire military equipment or strengthen its armed forces. Security does not depend on the quantity of weapons acquired; it rests on the ability of institutions to guarantee fundamental rights, provide quality public services, and promote dialogue as an alternative means of conflict resolution. In light of this understanding, the production of weapons in and of itself appears to be a direct threat to human security. Every weapon manufactured diverts resources that could otherwise fund conflict prevention and actually undermines the very security it purports to strengthen. The Defex scandal thus serves as a reminder that a society is truly secure only when its citizens can live free from fear, have access to quality public services, trust their institutions, and participate fully in the political and economic life of their country. Addressing corruption in the arms trade, while still important, will not be enough to solve the problem. As long as arms remain a commercial product that generates profits, the risks of corruption will persist. That is why it is necessary to have a broader discussion about ending dependence on arms and strengthening human security approaches.
The true cost of corruption in the arms trade cannot be measured solely in terms of the millions of euros embezzled. It is measured in schools that remain closed, hospitals that lack resources, displaced communities struggling to rebuild their lives, and citizens who are losing faith in their institutions. As long as the systems that fuel militarism and the global arms trade continue to take precedence over investments in peace and human security, scandals like the Defex scandal are likely to recur, in Cameroon and elsewhere.
For more on this check out the Corruption Tracker: https://corruption-tracker.org/
Our next Point of Impact is out and we are narrowing our focus on Cameroon
. For this piece our guest author, @DongmoFeugap, highlights how the true cost of corruption impacts us socially.
Dig in now: https://t.co/5F8Dc2NPeY pic.twitter.com/DB3WWf35MZ
— Corruption Tracker (@ArmsTradeCT) September 10, 2026
Guy Feugap, Africa Organizer for @worldbeyondwar breaks down his new blog piece ‘The Cost of Arms Deals and Corruption in Cameroon’.
Read Guy’s article here
@DongmoFeugaphttps://t.co/69npZAUgCW pic.twitter.com/uSrWsIfflu
— Corruption Tracker (@ArmsTradeCT) September 11, 2026
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