By Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 13 (IPS) - The ruling African National Congress (ANC) has mooted an unprecedented change in its constitution to attract more women into its leadership ranks.

The party will ask a national conference, beginning Dec 16 in Cape Town, to ratify a proposal that one in three party leaders is a woman.

Currently, only the national executive committee is constitutionally required to reach the 30 percent gender quota.

''In the endeavour to reach our objective of the full representation of women...the ANC shall implement a programme of affirmative action, including the provision of a quota of not less than one-third female representation in all its structures,'' reads the party's draft constitutional amendment.

Over 3000 delegates meet for five days next week to thrash out governing policy for the next five years. The ANC's five-yearly national conference is regarded as its key policy-making forum, where it also elects a new leadership, including party president.

President Thabo Mbeki will retain his position - he took the highest ANC office in 1997, when former president Nelson Mandela stepped down. Analysts believe the next party conference in 2007 could elect a female presidential candidate - possibly the incumbent Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

South African presidents are bound by the constitution to serve only two terms and Mbeki will be in office until 2009.

Dlamini-Zuma is the most senior female in the ANC ranks. She is reckoned by many to be of presidential mettle, though she is eclipsed in popular appeal by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the president of the ANC women's league and also the female leader who consistently polls top figures at ANC conferences. It's not for nothing that, South Africans often say, the country has not yet seen off its last Mandela presidency.

The leadership race aside, the conference is also likely to be charged with socio-economic debate. A report released earlier this month by the national statistics agency, StatsSA, could form the backdrop of discussions.

Measuring wealth through income and spending power, it has found that most black South Africans were in 2001, poorer than they were in 1995. '' The poorest 50 percent of people were even poorer in 2000, as against the poorest in 1995,'' says StatsSA. Because of apartheid economic and education policies, wealth in South Africa is still distributed along racial lines, so the poorest half of the population is majority black.

But the study also noted that the ''social wage'' in South Africa or government's ability to extend benefits like welfare, housing and education had also increased in the same time-frame off-setting the impact of growing unemployment and clawing poverty.

It found for example, that the proportion of households living in formal housing had increased from 66 percent of the population to 73 percent. Over eighty percent of South Africans had access to clean water, while over seven in 10 had used electricity for lighting. A smaller number of people used electricity for cooking and warming because it is still too expensive, even though South Africa is among the world's lowest cost producers.

The picture for sanitation is less healthy, with just over half of households reporting access to toilets. Education is much stronger with 94 percent of children in school. While these development gains are likely to be foreshadowed by the ANC at its national conference, analysts say the picture is not good enough after almost nine years in power.

One of them who believes this is Professor Sampie Terreblanche who after eight years of researching inequality in pre and post-apartheid inequality concludes the ANC has not done enough to divide the economic cake. He says the party's conference next week is a ''rare and important'' opportunity to re-evaluate its policies and adopt a path more influenced by a social democratic model than by a free market standard.

Of the same view are the ANC's alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the local communist party. Both want the ANC to extend a basic income grant of R100 (about 10 U.S. dollars) to poor South Africans to augment the social wage and they also believe the party can loosen the fiscal purse strings to free up more money to spend on welfare, education and health.

Since 1996, the ANC has followed a conservative economic programme, almost bringing the national budget to balance, but also sacrificing social spending to do so. COSATU predicts that despite a trend toward higher spending, the country will only return to 1996 levels of human development spending in 2005.

While the ANC's report-card on political change is good, its record on economic delivery is less so. In the main, it's been unable to meet the expectation of prosperity and this is politically dangerous, says Terreblanche.

''That expectations have not been realised may well lead to growing frustration and even to destructive rage, with the potential of undermining the social stability on which the newly attained democratic system depends,' ' he says.(END/IPS/AF/HD/IP/FK/MN/02)