LAGOS — Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, has threatened Cameroon in a video message on YouTube, warning that the same fate would befall the country as neighbouring Nigeria.

According to AFP, the video, which was posted on January 5, is directly addressed to Cameroon’s President Paul Biya after repeated fighting between militants and troops in the country’s far north.

“Oh Paul Biya, if you don’t stop this, your evil plot, you will taste what has befallen Nigeria… Your troops cannot do anything to us,” Shekau said in Arabic.

Paul Biya has been mentioned by Shekau before but it is the first time that he has directly addressed Cameroon and is the first admission that Boko Haram has been actively operating in the country.

Shekau, in military fatigues and green rubber boots, spoke for more than 17 minutes in the video, flanked by four masked Boko Haram fighters, two of whom hold the militants’ black flags.

Two others fighters are seen standing on the back of pick-up trucks fitted with heavy machineguns. Shekau fires an assault rifle into the air at the end of his address.

There was no indication when the video — entitled “Message to President Paul Biya of Cameroon” — was shot or where.

It also used the group’s preferred Arabic name “Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad” or “People committed to the propagation of the Prophet’s teachings and jihad.”

Boko Haram roughly translates from the Hausa language widely spoken in northern Nigeria as “Western education is forbidden.”

In the video, Shekau praises his fighters “inside Cameroonian soil” and calls on Biya to “repent.”

“If you do not, you will see what will come from Allah, the All-Powerful who has control over everything in respect of chastisement and calamity,” he says, waving his right index finger.

“Your troops are nothing. Even Nigerian soldiers couldn’t do anything to us.”

He also calls on the people of Cameroon to “rebel against democracy and shun it.”