Chama cha Mapinduzi’s Hussein Mwinyi, who was declared winner of the Zanzibar presidential election on Thursday, has struck a reconciliatory tone, saying the Zanzibar he envisaged will be built by “all Zanzibaris regardless of ideology”.

“Zanzibar is bigger and more important than our differences, and this victory is for all Zanzibaris,” he said, calling on the ruling party’s Chama cha Mapinduzi supporters to celebrate “in a civilised manner and without offending others as this victory would not be possible without competition”.

The Zanzibar Electoral Commission (ZEC) on Thursday declared Mr Mwinyi the archipelago’s new president, hours after police arrested and later released his main challenger Seif Shariff Hamad of the opposition ACT-Wazalendo party.

ZEC chairman Judge Hamid Mahmoud Hamid announced that Mr Mwinyi, the son of former Zanzibar and later Tanzania president Ali Hassan Mwinyi, had garnered 380,402 or 76 per cent of the total votes cast. His closest opponent Seif Shariff Hamad, 77, popularly known as Maalim Seif, making his sixth successive bid for president, got 19.87 per cent of the vote.

The 54-year-old Mr Mwinyi was Defence minister in the Tanzania Union government, and succeeds Ali Shein.

Zanzibar was rocked by violence when polling kicked off on Tuesday. Mr Hamad was arrested on Thursday as he called for what he described as “peaceful” street demonstrations after a tumultuous campaign in which ACT-Wazalendo supporters clashed with police.

It was his second arrest in two days following an earlier incident on Tuesday when he was taken into custody when he turned up to vote on a day set aside for members of Zanzibar’s special services, asserting that it was a ploy to “rig” the vote in advance.

He was released on police bail late on Thursday night. On Friday, he called a press conference to rail against the police’s rough treatment of ACT-Wazalendo official Ismail Jussa, who was arrested with him on Thursday. Mr Jussa, who sustained injuries during the fracas, was still in detention by late Friday.

By press time, neither Mr Hamad nor ACT-Wazalendo had made any more statements on ZEC’s announcement of the election result.