Maputo — Mozambique's ruling Frelimo Party has dismissed as mere bluster the threat by Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the former rebel movement Renamo, that "Mozambique will burn", unless the 28 October general elections are annulled.

Interviewed in the latest issue of the weekly paper "Magazine Independente", the Frelimo Central Committee Secretary for Mobilisation and Propaganda, Edson Macuacua, declared "the Renamo leader lost a good opportunity to keep his mouth shut. Renamo is out of control and desperate. This discourse by its leader is out of touch with the current situation in the country".

Macuacua pointed out that Renamo no longer enjoyed any of the political or material conditions that would allow it to set the country ablaze.

Furthermore, Dhlakama was not behaving like a man about to lead his troops into battle. Last week he was seen in public in a supermarket in the northern city of Nampula buying furniture for a new house he has acquired in that city (and which he later showed to curious reporters).

"People who buy furniture aren't preparing for war", said Macuacua. "They're preparing to enjoy the fruits of peace".

As for Renamo's demand for a transitional "Government of National Unity", Macuacua said this would be "an offence against the people's will. We would be annulling the elections, which is inconceivable. National unity has already been built by the vote, and cannot be unbuilt".

Macuacua also rejected the conspiracy theory that in bodies such as the National Elections Commission (CNE), Frelimo had entered into an alliance with Renamo to exclude the breakaway Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) from most of the parliamentary constituencies.

"This is an attempt to confuse public opinion, because in essence Renamo and the MDM are same party", he claimed. "They struggle for the same members, the same voters, and they have the same discourse and the same strategy".

All the main leaders of the MDM came from Renamo, he added, and there was "a natural and umbilical relation between Renamo and the MDM". Macuacua insisted that the exclusion of the MDM from nine of the 13 constituencies resulted simply from application of the electoral law, and the jurisprudence of the appeals body, the Constitutional Council.

Macuacua denied Renamo's allegations of electoral fraud, as just the complaints of bad losers. He said that Renamo monitors had been present at all the polling stations during the count and had all ratified the results.

However, both Renamo and the MDM say that their polling station monitors faced enormous difficulties in various parts of the country, including denial of credentials and expulsion from the polling stations.

Independent of the presence or competence of Renamo monitors, two types of fraud are well attested. One is the case of polling stations where the result sheets record absurdly high turnouts. Thus the district of Changara in Gaza province claimed a 96 per cent turnout, and Changara in Tete province claimed 95 per cent - this in an election where average turnout was about 42 per cent. Several of the stations in Changara and Chicualacuala recorded impossible turnouts of 100 per cent or over 100 per cent, with virtually all these voters casting their ballots for Frelimo.

Accepting these figures is to accept that in these places not only is political enthusiasm much higher than in the rest of the country, but that no voters died there since the start of compiling the current voters' roll in September 2007, that nobody was too ill to vote on 28 October, and nobody had left the district.

The second fraud is the deliberate invalidation of votes by dishonest polling station staff, who add a blob of ink to ballots during the count to make it look as if the voters concerned tried to vote for two candidates.

This can be detected statistically. In most polling stations invalid votes do not rise above three per cent or so of the total number of votes cast. When the number of invalid votes rise to over five per cent, they must be regarded as suspect, albeit not impossible, and anything over 10 per cent is a strong indication of fraud.

In the random sample of 976 polling stations from across the country, where result sheets were coped down by the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible grouping of domestic observers, 63 of them (more than six per cent) recorded invalid votes in excess of ten per cent, and in 21 stations (2.1 per cent) they were in excess of 20 per cent.