Critics of security forces misled

should not have any say in the ideals of the nation.
Recent media reports accusing and linking the security forces command hierarchy, (Chimurenga generation), to the politics of Zanu-PF, though not baffling, has become a nauseating political imagery peddled by people who lack in-depth understanding of security issues in a nation under siege.
More often than not, references and inferences have been made between the Zimbabwe security forces and the United States army in trying to draw parallels in the ways and processes of “internationally accepted standards and practices” which these media organisations see as being fondled, violated, and transgressed by our own forces in the discharge of their security duties.
The national security as part of a government system that has the objective of creating national and international political conditions that are favourable to the protection or extension of vital national values is misunderstood by some sections of our society, especially the private and independent media in Zimbabwe.
Or if they understand it, there is a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the value of our security forces in the public eye for the sole purpose of rendering Zimbabwe as ungovernable, especially in the interest of pending elections. Zimbabwe’s national security system, in recent years, has been a reaction to the international security landscape that had become complex and unpredictable in the face of a resurgence of colonialism and patronage of national resources by foreign nations. These nations find their relevance into our mainstream political discourse through the instigation of the so-called “international best practices” and these have threatened to decimate the fibre and frame of our national security.
The “international best practices” have ordinarily come to replace the pre-colonial missionaries’ duties and tasks in forerunning for the re-colonisation of Africa and post-land-redistribution Zimbabwe. The forced conformity to international practices, as pressured by the opposition parties in the country, is certainly against the nation’s shared principles premised on the assumption that there should be a national consensus and cohesion as a result of the liberation war ideals and fundamentals.
These fundamentals transcend political boundaries and include national values, national purpose, national goals and national interests. It is the values which define who we are, what we do and why we do things the way we do them. They form the basis of our security, our well-being and prosperity. Hence as a country, we should be compelled to protect and respect these values and consistently promote them to those outside our realm and those separated from us by time and space.
Any stable nation should share a national purpose and values, should pursue common national goals and objectives and should be focused on the attainment and protection of national interests. Political parties should, therefore, only differ in the strategy of delivering the same package to the nation. These fundamentals should be propagated and communicated to each and every citizen through various political parties’ manifestos and other mass media channels.
Barry Buzan in “Setting up the Scene: The National Security of Zimbabwe”, introduced the concept of state in the security problematique of Zimbabwe. Buzan contends that a state has three components which are the physical (territory and population), the institutional (the entire government machinery including its executive, legislature, administrative and judiciary bodies) and the ideas of the state (socio-political).
These different components of the state are vulnerable to different kinds of threats, making national security a challenge in many dimensions rather than a matter of military defence. Hence when the military command hierarchy warns the nation against such a multilateral security threat, some people, politicians and the civic society, whose ideas, ideologies and creeds form part of the grand threat against the nationhood of Zimbabwe, create scenes and try to attract the might of their foreign sponsors.
Let Zimbabwe be aware that threats to security can come through and can be targeted at the decision-making levels of the state. According to Buzan, the state can be threatened by the destruction of the individuals who carry it or by changing their minds about what its contents should be. The contentious contents of the new constitution are a case in point.
Zimbabwe as a state, its institutions and even its territory, is threatened by the manipulation of ideas left to circulate in the society in the name of democracy and good governance. Note that democracy and good governance, though being panaceas of a liberal and free society, have remained a political illusion in this world.
This has led to the asymmetric threat of unconstitutional change of government through the written and covert foreign-engineered manifestos of some of our political parties in Zimbabwe. These threats have manifested themselves in illegal sanctions for regime change, subversive activities designed to undermine the authority of the ideals of our liberation struggle and leaders, erode the confidence of the citizens in the current security regime and diminish service delivery to the people.