When Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe reports in

TODAY, the Zanu-PF Youth League converges in Mashonaland East Province for the first of 10 rallies, dubbed Nationwide Presidential

Interface, they have been organised to enable President Mugabe to meet with youths nationwide.

Through the rallies, the Youth League is also launching a youth voter mobilisation programme. We wish them well in this endeavour.

What the Zanu-PF Youth League is showing today at a time their MDC-T rivals are trying to outdo each other insulting President Mugabe on social media is why several analysts, including some opposition leaders, have pointed to a Zanu-PF victory in 2018. And the reasons are obvious. Today in Marondera, Zanu-PF publicly displays its capacity to mobilise structures. It is important to contrast what the Youth League is doing with what the MDC-T, the biggest opposition party in Zimbabwe, tried to do a few weeks back when Mr Morgan Tsvangirai went around the country meeting his party’s office bearers ostensibly to consult on whether or not to enter into a coalition with other fringe political parties ahead of next year’s harmonised elections.

So while the MDC-T was and still is “consulting” on how it will contest, Zanu-PF is already mobilising its structures to prepare to vote.

And it is important to remember that this is a Zanu-PF that has kept its structures oiled for elections since 2013 by contesting all council and parliamentary by-elections, winning all but one, the Norton parliamentary seat that was snatched by a former Zanu-PF provincial chairman, after the party’s Commissariat Department unwisely chose to impose a candidate against the people’s wishes.

So while Zanu-PF is on the ground, mobilising its supporters, the MDC-T has been on a sabbatical boycotting all by-elections to hide its electoral weaknesses.

So while Zanu-PF has regularly gauged its strengths amd weaknesses, the MDC-T does not know where it stands since 2013.

The opposition party has, instead spent its energies on social media, mistaking hashtags for genuine support oblivious of the international nature of social media platforms.

Some of the bloggers will be nowhere near a ballot box come 2018 unlike the youths who will throng Rudhaka Stadium today.

Add to this, the appeal of and successes registered in Zanu-PF’s progressive people-centred programmes like the land reform, indigenisation and economic empowerment, the Presidential Inputs Support Scheme and Command Agriculture programmes, and one gets to understand why think-tanks like Afrobarometer, scholars like Professor Stephen Chan and Julia Gallagher, and Dr Toendepi Shonhe, analysts like Raymond Majongwe, and opposition stalwarts like Tendai Biti have all written off the opposition ahead of 2018.

We raise the foregoing in light of the opposition’s infantile sense of entitlement that it is ordained to win elections simply because it is the opposition.

Politics is a game of numbers, and numbers are mobilised.

We hope no one will cry foul when Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe reports in next year.