It's a million-passenger train!

DESTINATION: ROBERT MUGABE SQUARE, HARARE.

There is something irresistible about events that make history.

Whether one likes them or not, they still happen and go on and shape the course of the world, change people and places.

This could hold true of the Million-Man March in solidarity with President Mugabe being held today in Harare.

The event was organised by the Zanu-PF Youth League and it faced a lot of challenges as it was cast in so many confusing and conflicting frames.

Most dangerous for it, it could easily have fallen victim to the needless - and we always make sure to point this out - factionalism that the ruling party has come to be identified with.

Well, until some 20 days ago when the ruling party's Politburo gave the march a date, today May 25, 2016, rendering it a matter of continental significance and a revolutionary euphoria.

The Youth League are telling us that they are celebrating an icon of Africa.

President Mugabe is.

At home he is the unifier and the face of the revolution - a magical glue to not only his party, but also the entire country.

Hence he is driving the train today.

He is also the destination.

And to illustrate his magic one should only look at the statements that were said by war vets leader, Victor Matemadanda, who fronts an organisation that was at some point at loggerheads with the youth who came up with the idea of the march.

He recognises who the driver is.

He told us that he is duty bound to jump on to the train to Robert Mugabe Square.

"Even if we were not invited, if it is clear that it is being done for the President, we are duty bound to attend. People had not been given information and there was a lot of speculation, but that has been rectified. We have been given information and there is no doubt it is in support of the President and we have no reason not to attend. We are going to attend effectively and actively," he said this week.

He added: "I know there has been a lot of talk regarding the march, its organisation and purpose, but we as leadership have said comrades must come. The march is not in support of any particular group or in the interest of any group, but it is for the President and him being our patron and Commander-in-chief, we are obliged to come and support. We are not only supporting, but taking leadership and giving direction on how it should be done. When I say direction, I am talking about war veterans being elders, the youths are our children and yes, they could have positions, but they remain our children. As parents we will not necessarily lead, but advise."

There we go!

Zanu-PF is a movement and it is a party of massive organisation and discipline. There was little doubt that it could turn otherwise.

Today's march will be a tour de force by the revolutionary party, especially in light of attempts by the opposition a few weeks back to show off numbers, something that did not exactly impress.

Now was it a show of national character, but a contest among political forces with the old players seeking to show the new and minnows that they still have the say.

Zanu-PF is set to assert its space: after all, it is the party that resoundingly won the last elections in 2013, whipping the opposition boys.

Midway to another bout, it has to register a statement, and the Youth League is just out to do that.

You can expect the trepidation that the opposition has been feeling, even to the point of ridiculousness.

One paper suggested, rather incredulously, that the youths that will converge today in support of President Mugabe should suddenly mutate into opposition vigilantes and tell President Mugabe to step down!

How imaginative!

But it is the opposition MDC-T that has deep palpable fear which appeared to threaten, to disorientate some party officials: that fear of the prospect of seeing a million people marching for President Mugabe.

A rebuttal of opposition politics.

A loud and marching statement.

An opposition nightmare.

Thus, the opposition spokesman, adding to the protesting noises in the opposition press, said: "Instead of massaging the personal ego of the man who has caused the pauperisation of millions of Zimbabwe by staging a totally puerile, purposeless and wasteful so-called million man march, the Zanu-PF regime or whichever of its factions is organising and funding this thoroughly discredited march, should actually be staging a march to publicly apologise to Zimbabwe for ruining and destroying a country that used to be the breadbasket of Southern Africa."

Is it not ridiculous that this spokesman is seeking to prevent people who believe in President Mugabe's capabilities to support him when his own party was allowed to disprove of the same President Mugabe?

Well, the answer is simply that he knows that their own march will be dwarfed and drowned today and they will have nothing, so will be the people, to look back and remember the day the MDC-T marched.

It would have been nicer and convenient for the opposition to have no challengers at all so that they, in turn, would continue to stroke their egos over a couple of thousand marchers.

Today's prospective million gives them goosebumps.

But that is democracy, and the game of numbers called politics, isn't it?

We alluded to a train at the beginning of the piece.

Yes, the train will move inexorably through Harare while dogs bark.