From the deserted streets of Bulawayo to the fetid slums of Mbare, Zimbabwe was waiting on tenterhooks last night to discover the fate of President Mugabe as he appeared to be heading towards election defeat.

With official counts trickling out of Harare, the clamour grew for the authorities to tell the people what they already knew from their own polling stations: that for the old tyrant, the writing was on the wall.

Lists posted outside each station announced the scale of the swing to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which scooped up the figures from teams of observers to declare that it was bound for a landslide victory in parliamentary and presidential polls.

The MDC said that its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was outpacing his old adversary by two to one, leading the presidential race with 60 per cent of the vote with almost two-thirds of constituencies counted. In the parliamentary poll Cabinet ministers were set to lose their seats.

The sluggish pace of official results heightened fears that a massive fraud was under way to keep Mr Mugabe clinging to power. By the end of the day the handful of results released showed his Zanu (PF) party taking 31 seats and the opposition 35 in the 210-seat Parliament. Significant scalps included the Justice Minister, Patrick Chinamasa. No official results have been released in the presidential race.

Curiously, each update of the results showed the two parties running neck and neck. “Someone is playing games here,” a researcher for an election watchdog said. “These are not the first results as they randomly become available, as it should be. It looks like someone is deliberately spacing them in a crude attempt to placate suspicion.”

Diplomatic and opposition sources said that Mr Mugabe held a crisis meeting with his security chiefs on Sunday night at which they discussed how to deal with what appeared to be a crushing defeat. Options included declaring victory, stopping the count or declaring martial law.

The sources, which included a former Zanu (PF) member and an MDC official, said that the Joint Operations Command, Mr Mugabe’s security cabinet, failed to agree on a course of action and instead decided to delay the results to buy more time. A senior British diplomat said: “The scenario is entirely credible.”

Counting began at the 9,000 polling stations as soon as the polls closed on Saturday evening and the results were posted on the walls and doors for all to see. A copy was then sent to the constituency command centre, which collated the results and sent them to provincial level and then to Harare, from where the results were to be announced. Independent observers and party agents collected results from the polling stations and sent them to their own command centres, resulting in the tallies that the opposition is using to back its claims to be heading to a landslide victory.

The publication of results at polling station level, a first in Zimbabwe’s flawed electoral history, has emerged as the Achilles’ heel of any attempt at postelection fixing. Observers are torn between two competing theories about the new practice: that it was evidence of bold independence on the part of the Electoral Commission or that it reflects a serious miscalculation by the ruling party, which believed that releasing results at village level would make its threats of retaliation against opponents stick better.

Having the figures in the public domain will seriously complicate any attempt to rig the vote. But attention is turning to northern constituencies, cut off by flooding, that opposition and independent observers could not reach. The MDC claimed before the polls to have discovered more than a million “ghost voters” on northern electoral rolls – a figure that could be used to disguise ballot stuffing on a grand scale.

Yesterday the clamour for clarity spilled over Zimbabwe’s borders, with Britain and the US joining opposition parties and independent observers in their calls to release the results. “The people have spoken against the dictatorship,” Tendai Biti, the MDC general secretary, said in Harare. “We are anxiously waiting for the final results. We pray that there will not be reengineering of the people’s will.”

The Electoral Commission says that it will take two days for the results to be announced. Mr Biti is betting that it will take four. He said that he had been told by sources within the commission that the official result would present Mr Mugabe as having won 52 per cent of the presidential vote, giving him an absolute majority, and 111 parliamentary seats – enough for a parliamentary majority, too.

David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, called for the voice of Zimbabwe’s voters “to be heard without delay”. There is a fear of an outbreak of the kind of violence that rocked Kenya after its disputed election, when both sides claimed victory despite the absence of any official count.

Zimbabwe has no independent broadcast outlets but two radio stations began playing, uncommented upon, a stream of protest anthems from Bob Marley’sGet up, Stand up, to Eddy Grant’s Gimme Hope, Joanna. Along the road leading to the Zanu (PF)’s headquarters, someone had splashed yellow paint over huge posters of Mr Mugabe – a defacement reminiscent of that meted out to Saddam Hussein’s portraits after his fall.

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