By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare | The COVID deaths of high ranking Zimbabwean officials who come from our security cluster is really concerning. It signals a lack of leadership, organization and preparation; weak systems and non-existent defense protocols for the new forms of warfare that the world faces.
The reason I say this is, everyone knows that COVID started outside Africa with many science experts warning that it was a biological attack and that it was expected to take a toll on African countries.
With these insights, one would have expected Zimbabwe (which is led by security technocrats who already know that that nation is under an economic attack [sanctions] by the same western nations….Our leaders would then have been expected to take serious precautions and to implement a robust counter strategy against this national security threat.
The aggravating factors are that from inception, it was known that all nations had to proactively contain this foreign biological agent [COVID19] by controlling predictable avenues it could enter our nations, such as:
- Foreign travelers, returning residents coming back home, essential service personnel traveling between boarders, asylum seekers and infiltrators bringing in infection.
• As obvious precautions, restrictions should have been put on foreign travelers coming into the country,
• testing and quarantining of all foreigners already at the port of entry, essential service personnel, asylum seekers, returning residents and any captured infiltrators should have been strictly adhered to,
• boarder patrols should have been ramped up to contain illegal entry by returning residents and infiltrators,
• the monitoring of our air space should have also been doubled up to war time status.
- Positive Carriers With False Or Faulty Test Results:
A very plausible threat was always going to be positive COVID19 carriers coming into the country with false or faulty test results from high risk countries that are spreading the disease or high threat nations that have a record of advancing biological warfare in Africa and of course, those that are hostile to the country.
• To mitigate this risk, our government should have shut down the country to stop an influx of returning residents returning home with tests done in the flagged high risk and high threat countries.
• The country should have conducted its own tests on people coming from these high risk/high threat countries and if it didn’t have the capacity, it should have discouraged inbound travel, quarantined or refused entry to anyone coming from these countries, until it could verify through its own systems, the status of those returning.
- Contaminated Test Swabs:
Just like false negative results in carriers can spread the disease, test swabs have also been flagged as potential carriers of the disease, that are designed to infect large numbers of people during testing,
• for this reason, all test swabs should have been treated as a threat and risk management precautions taken until the suspicion has been eliminated.
• In these times of biological warfare, nations can’t trust other nations, therefore, by now Zimbabwe should be regulating the importation, decontamination and random batch testing of all test swabs.
• It is also prudent for the country to be using its own NonGMO cotton to manufacture its own test swabs.
- Hostile Foreign Embassies And NGOs Spreading The Disease:
• With countries like the US, UK, EU and their NGOs being renowned for using biological warfare to spread imperialism in the past, and some of them having declared Zimbabwe an enemy state. Such nations and their institutions should have been flagged as potential threats to the country. As a result:
• restrictions should have been put on their staffs’ movement and contact with Zimbabwean nationals, including our senior officials, until we eliminate the possibility that this disease was intentionally created and disseminated as a form of biological warfare.
• Intelligence teams should have been deployed to all embassies and NGOs, to monitor and tract the movements of their staff and personnel.
• skys over the US, EU and UK embassies as high threat countries, should be monitored continuously to ensure that they are not flying unmanned aerial vehicles over our citizens and spreading any agents.
- Domestic Infections And Reinfections:
Where infections have occurred already due to a lax implementation of the above mitigation measures, the spread should have been managed by rigorous quarantine, tracking, sanitation, hand washing, social distancing, steaming, mask wearing, dietary improvement, limitation of cross boarder movement and the use of already available traditional homeopathic and allopathic remedies.
The fact that a disease suspected to be a foreign biological agent, has entered the country and infected the heart of the nation’s elite and high ranking officials who are supposedly insulated from the masses, illustrates:
• a serious failure of disease isolation,
• a serious failure of national security and threat management,
• a serious failure of VIP protection.
• a lack of defensive containment strategy for national threats,
• ill-discipline on the part of the high ranking officials and the elite who have gotten infected by a foreign biological agent disproportionately to countries where the disease is coming from, when means to mitigate infection exist,
• and finally, maybe it’s time that we consider that there might be other means by which this disease is spreading.
There is a lack of national threat and national security consciousness among our security chiefs and politicians, something that we witnessed with their unwillingness to launch an aggressive campaign to fight against sanctions for 20yrs. Now those same sanctions have weakened our defensive capacity to tackle this national security threat.
Our security chiefs have an outdated conception of what constitutes national security threats in the modern era and the linkages of these modern threats to the overall security of the nation.
As a consequence they have failed to appreciate the threat of sentiment, disinformation, economic attacks, food (chemicals, GMOs), AI, cyber warfare and biological agents on military objectives. As a result our military ignores these threats and focuses myopically on traditional militaristic threats only, allowing the gradual weakening of our nation’s integrity and security by these modern weapons.
We need a paradigm shift in national security strategy in Zimbabwe if we are going to survive the weakening of our nation and continent by these new weapons of war. Below is a diagram of how the US Department Of Defense sees national defense.
Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare.