Maputo — Without waiting for the final results to be announced, a prominent member of Mozambique's main opposition party, Renamo, has demanded that Wednesday's general elections be annulled.

Interviewed in the central city of Quelimane by Radio Mozambique, Renamo parliamentarian Jose Manteigas dismissed the election as fraudulent. He said the current parliament should be dissolved, the elections annulled and new elections organised.

In the intervening period, a caretaker government should be set up to run the country. He did not suggest how this government should be formed or who its members should be.

Manteigas claimed that many votes for Renamo had been deliberately invalidated by polling station staff, who had added ink marks to ballot papers to make it look as if the voters concerned had tried to vote for more than one candidate.

This sort of fraud has certainly happened in the past. Dishonest polling station staff were seen adding marks to ballot papers during the second round of the mayoral election in the northern port of Nacala on 11 February. Both the National Elections Commission (CNE) and the appeals body, the Constitutional Council, admitted that this had happened. The CNE says it sent the names of the polling staff involved to the Attorney-General's Office so that criminal action could be taken against them.

But so far, AIM has not received reports from any observers or journalists watching the general election which indicate that the same fraud has happened this time. This fraud is easily detected statistically, since adding ink marks to the ballot papers results in a sharp increase in the number of ballots that are classified as "invalid votes". Thus when any polling station reports that over five per cent of the ballots cast are invalid, suspicions should be aroused (in the Nacala case, three polling stations recorded absurd levels of invalid votes, reaching almost 30 per cent in one case).

Manteigas gave no details. Verifying his claims will require a detailed look at the results sheets from the polling stations concerned to check if they do indeed show serious anomalies in the number of votes considered invalid.

Asked to comment on Manteigas' demands for new elections, the Central Committee Secretary for Information and Propaganda of the ruling Frelimo Party, Edson Macuacua, told AIM it made no sense to call for the annulment of an election while the votes were still being counted.

"This reaction from Renamo is completely out of place", he said. "It's absurd that someone calls for scrapping an electoral process when it hasn't even finished".

Macuacua pointed out that local and foreign observer groups had basically given the election a clean bill of health. Furthermore, political parties, including Renamo, "had the right to monitor the voting, and to present protests at the polling stations. They didn't do so".

He said that Renamo was behaving "in a disoriented, desperate and incoherent way". He suggested that Renamo should behave "as a good loser" and "reconcile itself to reality and the will of the people".