Maputo — Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's main opposition party, Renamo, has once again threatened an "incendiary revolution", because of the alleged "theft of votes" in last week's general elections.

Speaking immediately after he met, in the northern city of Nampula, with leaders of the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible grouping of Mozambican domestic election observers, Dhlakama said he would not organise or head such a "revolution" - instead it would be the spontaneous work of those who felt themselves defrauded at the polling stations.

The chairperson of the Observatory, Brazao Mazula, and the leader of the Human rights League (LDH), Alice Mabota, had gone to Nampula to give Dhlakama his copy of the Observatory report on the election. This included some very bad news for Dhlakama - the Observatory's parallel count, from a large and random sample of polling stations, is broadly in line with the results announced over Radio Mozambique, and with the provisional count done by the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the civil service.

The Observatory's count concludes that incumbent President Armando Guebuza has won with between 74 and 76 per cent of the vote, and that Dhlakama has around 14 per cent.

According to a report in Friday's issue of the independent newsheet "Mediafax", Dhlakama claimed that this supposedly spontaneous uprising includes 4,500 former Renamo guerrillas in Nampula alone, who are just waiting for "the whistle" before they advance.

But who would blow this whistle if not Dhlakama himself? He insisted that he was "not interested in war", but if the authorities failed to obey his demand that the elections be annulled "I might take another decision".

Mazula told reporters that he had received guarantees from Dhlakama that "he does not intend to put peace at risk".

The vast majority of Renamo's fighters were demobilized in 1994, prior to the first multi-party elections. Dhlakama has kept a couple of hundred of them under arms as an illegal security forces referred to as his "Presidential Guard". It is highly unlikely that there are anywhere near 4,500 former Renamo fighters in Nampula prepared to return to the hardships of guerilla life in the bush.