Malawi's President Bingu wa Mutharika vowed Friday to press ahead with his anti-graft campaign and to pursue popular farm subsidies to stave off food shortages, as he took his oath for a second term.

"We want to turn Malawi into a hunger-free nation and will continue with the subsidy programme for the majority of the poor to access fertiliser," Mutharika said in a Blantyre stadium where tens of thousands had gathered for his inauguration.

He also vowed to press ahead with his anti-corruption campaign, calling graft "evil, a menace because it robs the poor and denies them legitimate right to development." Mutharika swept to victory in Tuesday's elections with 66 percent of the vote, against 31 percent for his nearest rival John Tembo.

He took his oath just hours after being declared the victor, before a handful of regional leaders including Presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Rupiah Banda of Zambia, as cheering supporters sang and danced in the stadium.

Malawi's former president Bakili Muluzi witnessed the ceremony, although he had campaigned tirelessly to unseat Mutharika and forged an opposition alliance with Tembo.

Tembo said Thursday the polls were "rigged because the level of win is not normal." His Malawi Congress Party has already filed a formal protest with electoral authorities.

But Muluzi has publicly accepted the result and urged calm in the southern African country, one of the poorest on the planet.

"I need to be exemplary as former head of state.

This is politics and elections are over.

We need to remain united and peaceful.

I don't want to see violence because of disgruntled poll losers," Muluzi told reporters.

Tembo was the right-hand man to the late dictator Kamuzu Banda, whose iron-fisted rule lasted three decades, and had struggled to shed his links to the atrocities of that period.

Police said they are on alert for any possible violence, after protests erupted following the last polls in 2004, with two people shot dead by police.

"We have special instructions to crush any form of violence or protest," a senior police officer told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Although voting was peaceful, observers from the European Union and the Commonwealth said Mutharika had benefited from a bias in state media while also pointing to problems with the voters' roll.

The election was also marred by the arrest of journalists working for a radio station, owned by Muluzi, that broadcast a programme regarded as demeaning by the state.

Muluzi had handpicked Mutharika as his successor in the 2004 elections, when he hit his constitutional two-term limit.

But after taking power, Mutharika broke away to form his own Democratic Progressive Party, taking less than a third of the 193 parliamentarians with him.

Ballots were still being counted in more than 60 constituencies, but Mutharika's party looked set to take a majority in the new parliament, bagging 78 seats so far.

Mutharika had campaigned on the popularity of his agricultural subsidies to help subsistence farmers, who feed 80 percent of the population.

Memories are still fresh from a 2005 famine that hit five million of the nation's 13 million people.

Half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, leaving them at constant risk of hunger simply if the rains turn bad.

One in 10 adults is HIV-positive, and AIDS has orphaned more than half a million children, while driving life expectancy down to 43 years.

Mutharika has brought three years of bumper crops - aided by plentiful rains - and has presided over an average of seven percent economic growth during that period.

He has also launched an anti-corruption drive that has seen Muluzi caught up in dozens of charges accusing the former president of embezzling 12 million dollars (8.6 million euros) in donor funds.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2009

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