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Ghana's voters will hold not just their own futures but the battered hopes of a continent in their hands when they elect a new leader on Sunday to guide the transition of their prospering nation into an oil producer.

The outcome is far from clear and many Ghanaians expect the presidential vote to go to a second round run-off on Dec. 28.

With the main candidates, both foreign-trained lawyers, promising jobs and economic development, simply holding a fifth credible poll in a row would be a boost for a continent reeling from electoral strife from Kenya and Zimbabwe to nearby Nigeria.

"We are now at the crossroads -- the choices we'll be making in this election are crucial for determining what we want to do with our economic potentials," Kojo Asante, of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development thinktank, told Reuters.

President John Kufuor is due to stand down in January after the maximum two terms, during which pro-market reforms and political stability have helped revive a once stagnant economy. A new parliament will be elected at the same time.

The mood of national optimism evokes the excitement of Ghana's early years under pan-African visionary Kwame Nkrumah. He led Britain's Gold Coast colony as the first black African nation to throw off colonial rule in 1957, only for it to plunge into decades of turmoil, mismanagement and on-off military rule.

"Ghana, if it can move through this election smoothly, goes onto another plane," said Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at London think-tank Chatham House.

"There is a hope that Ghana exerts some pull on other African countries ... Ghana is important in terms of the stability of West Africa and the regional economy," he said.

Already the world's second biggest cocoa grower and Africa's second largest gold miner, the discovery of offshore oil expected to come onstream in late 2010 has the potential to speed up the transformation of Ghana's economy.

INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGES

For children playing in the dusty streets and alongside stinking drains in the capital Accra, where people defecate, that change can not come fast enough.

"In Accra there is no sanitation system," World Bank country director Ishac Diwan told Reuters. "If you look at the map, the northern half of the country has a very low density of roads."

After Ghana raised $750 million in sub-Saharan Africa's first international dollar-denominated Eurobond last year, some government departments planned bond issues to fund projects, but global financial turmoil meant they would have to wait, Diwan said.

Economic growth rates, likewise, would dip after years of averaging 5-6 percent, due to the world crisis slashing commodity export earnings, investment and the $3 billion worth of remittances from Ghanaians abroad, he said.

Future growth hopes are firmly pinned on oil development.

Nana Akufo-Addo, a British-trained barrister from Kufuor's ruling centre-right New Patriotic Party (NPP), and opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) leader and former Fulbright scholar John Atta Mills, have both promised economic progress.

Pollsters can't agree who will win either the presidential or parliamentary polls. Some commentators say the NPP has the edge as the incumbent party; others that the NDC could pick up vital pro-change, anti-NPP votes in a presidential run-off.

But despite energetic campaigning, which has bubbled over into violence that killed several people in the volatile and impoverished north, there is little to choose between them.

Both candidates have invoked Barack Obama's election as the first black U.S. president to rally support, though Mills perhaps more convincingly as the left-of-centre candidate with closer ties to Obama's U.S. Democratic Party.

"I choose Nana," said 23-year-old Cleopatra, a prostitute plying for trade in an Accra hotel wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt. "I watched for the past few years what he and his party have done, and it's good".

Source: Reuters