Online Reporter
Gibson Nyikadzino-Zimpapers Politics Hub
It was Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader, Thomas Isdore Sankara who said: “An army without patriotic political education is only a potential criminal.”
This means that men and women in uniform must be taught or learn ethics, civic duty, and know about nation building, and not just how to fight.
Of essence to acknowledge here is that the spiritual character of patriotism can be greatly strengthened and embodied in military men and women as a way to cultivate the quality of patriotism conducive to inspire the establishment of a correct political outlook and values. Without moral and political values, the armed forces can be used against the people.
For the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), these values are espoused in the remembrance of the mighty and courageous men and women who in the past and present fought and are fighting to provide national service by laying down their very lives to protect the state.
In the over four decades the ZDF have kept Zimbabwe’s security, independence and peace afloat, even in times of macro-aggressions by external forces who at the turn of the millennium wanted to effect regime change. At a time when the United States and British armies wanted to deploy boots in Zimbabwe in the post-millennium period, the ZDF applied military operations other than war to ensure that Zimbabwe was stable.
These included, preventive defence, cooperative security, and defence engagements with other Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries to keep the region’s strategic culture vibrant, and exposing the West’s neo-colonial discomforts that are now, in many cases, coming through non-traditional military efforts.
Envying Western armies?
History teaches that it was the West that gave Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko weapons and provided him with intelligence to capture and kill that country’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba. It was the West who provided Blaise Compaore with intelligence and weapons to assassinate Burkina Faso’s popular and citizen-loved revolutionary, Thomas Isdore Sankara.
And the West will always give one of Africa’s compatriots are weapons to kill another compatriot, so that it is one African killing a fellow Africa. Then the West is absolved! Upon this realisation, the tense situation unfolding in West Africa and the Sahel region relating to security threats and instability resulting from terrorism in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and extending to the conflict in Sudan tells of the role, in particular the French army, has in destabilising that region.
The French army has allegedly been providing intelligence and resources to terrorist groups operating in the Sahel. It is the same army that led the invasions in Libya, leading to the demise of Colonel Gadaffi. As usual, Western governments seem to have been absolved in these unfortunate incidents.
What the ZDF is not
There are liberal ideological strands that Western political and academic institutions have come up with to dismiss and denigrate the importance of the armies and defence forces of African countries, especially when they hold forte to defend the principles of their nations and secure the interests of their founding values.
Where African armies, borne out of colonial struggles and defeating the settler establishment, have since the end of the Cold War in 1991 been pushed by the West to accept then phenomenon the West called the “democratisation era” that was to give Western countries lordship over other states by entrenching their “democratic values”.
However, when the Western countries want to impose their values, it is their armies and militaries established in “democratic” states that continue to cause untold suffering in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and even so, in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
It however carries more questions than answers relating to why the “democratic military” of the West is keen on such bloodshed, as the case in Iran and Gaza? It is so because the system that the West wants to lure other African states to adopt for their countries is a highly treacherous one that wants to make the politically stable African countries vulnerable and weak militarily.
This is however what the ZDF is not accustomed to. The ZDF is not accustomed to abandoning the values, history and principles of what makes Zimbabwe what it is today. Zimbabwe’s military men and women are the salient components of the security and defence institution of the omnipotent state and above all, its true emblem.
Calm in time of uncertainty
As of April 2026, the White House released its fiscal 2027 budget blueprint with a record 44 percent increase in defence spending. For 2027, the United States is working on a US$1,5 trillion request, building on the record US$1 trillion for 2026.
That alone tells of the United States’ agenda as a global militarist state that seeks to encircle the world through a show of force and penetrate resolute armies, disturb peace, cause instability and throw the world into chaos.
China, on the other hand, has the second biggest defence budget of US$251 billion this year. It should be known that the values and interests of the state, including the military, claim precedence over any other temporarily powerful group or leader.
For the ZDF to have helped maintained a tranquil environment at a time great powers, back then, were advancing with plans for military invasion, exhibit the nature of Zimbabwe’s patriotic forces; they can neither be bought nor sold!
The values that the ZDF, the security and military establishments, represent are values of the state, values that do not need to be altered. This outline makes it clear that any attempt to misrepresent Zimbabwe’s security sector and military organisation cuts to the core of the nation’s identity.
In view of the ZDF, their tremendous efforts should be rewarded by having citizens that are not cowardly, but those who express righteous fury against any setup that targets the statehood of Zimbabwe, as well as its patriotic values as reflected by the ZDF.
The strength and commitment of the ZDF in keeping the State strong and steady should not be seen as a romantic fantasy, it is both a lived and experienced reality.
Zimbabweans, remember we are one. This is homeland!
