Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, has continued its long tradition of rejecting the results of Mozambican general elections.

In an immediate reaction to the official results, announced by the National Elections Commission (CNE) on Wednesday, showing that the ruling Frelimo Party won with 75 per cent of the votes, Renamo general secretary Ossufo Momade, demanded that the elections be annulled and a transitional government be set up to run the country until the electoral laws could be overhauled and new polls organised.

At a hastily convened Maputo press conference to which much of the press was not invited, Momade made a personal attack on Felisberto Naife, general director of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the executive body of the CNE, claiming that he had organised the massive fraud alleged by Renamo.

Momade even claimed that Renamo had been taken by surprise when it found that its candidates had been disqualified for about half the district constituencies for the elections for the provincial assemblies. But it is impossible that Renamo did not know about this, since the decision was taken by the CNE and two of the CNE's 13 members were appointed by Renamo.

Renamo appeared to agree with the CNE that it had not provided the legally required documentation for its candidates for the provincial assemblies, since it made no protest at the time (early September) either publicly, or through an appeal to the Constitutional Council.

Momade said that Renamo is in favour of peace, but he did not exclude "new sacrifices" in order "to save democracy".

In Beira, the Renamo provincial political delegate, Fernando Mbararano, produced what he claimed was new evidence of fraud. This was a 15 year old girl, who claimed that her school director had coerced her into voting for Frelimo - even though she is a minor and so is not on the electoral register.

The girl said that on the day of the elections, as she was returning from a visit to the local market, she met the director in the street, who said that she must vote, and if she refused she would fail the year. He provided her with a voter card in the name of a teacher called, according to the girl, "Minoria Joao".

Even if the girl's story is true, that is one vote out of the 4.3 million cast. No observer or journalist witnessed large numbers of underage girls, armed with phoney voter cards, queuing up at the polling stations.

Renamo waited for a fortnight before producing this witness - by which time the indelible ink put on the index finger of anyone voting has worn off. The other problem with this story is that the seventh grade schoolgirl, terrified of her director on 28 August, was quite willing to denounce him in public two weeks later.

As a mechanism for committing fraud, recruiting 15 year olds seems remarkably inefficient - for there is no way the director could know who the girl had really voted for in the secrecy of the voting booth.

The Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), although it continues to argue that the elections were marred by fraud, has not called for their annulment. Instead, it is pursuing legal channels - the MDM election agent, Jose Manuel de Sousa, told reporters in Beira on Wednesday that it had compiled a dossier on electoral offences, which it would submit to the Attorney-General's Office.

The MDM leader and mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango, described the elections as "democratic illegality", but was pleased that the election of eight MDM members to the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, broke the bipolar nature of that institution.

Simango had the grace to congratulate the winners and wish them well in their governance, even though he regarded the results more a product of the electoral bodies than of the electorate.