By John Chiahemen JOHANNESBURG, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The most influential provincial leadership of South Africa's ANC has voted in favour of President Thabo Mbeki remaining head of the ruling party next year, a potential blow to his former deputy Jacob Zuma. Political analysts said the resolution passed by the Eastern Cape province on Sunday signalled the start of the fiercest contest for the leadership of the African National Congress in its 94-year history. Some analysts said the contest could fan dangerous ethnic politics within the ANC, with Zuma counting on the support of his fellow Zulu, South Africa's biggest ethnic group based in KwaZulu-Natal province. The Eastern Cape is predominantly Xhosa and produced the elite of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Mbeki himself. The province will have the biggest single block of votes at the ANC's leadership conference in December 2007, boosting Mbeki's chances if he wants to remain ANC leader. The positions of party leader and state president have been held by the same person since the ANC came to power in South Africa's first democratic poll in 1994. Zuma had been seen as next in line to be party leader -- a coveted springboard to the national presidency, given the overwhelming popularity of the ANC as the party that liberated the black majority from apartheid. ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama welcomed the Eastern Cape resolution as part of the democratic process. "All provinces and (ANC) structures are free to take their resolutions, but at the end of the day it will be the national conference that will decide," Ngonyama told Reuters. Mbeki has made clear he will not seek a third term as South Africa's president when his second and constitutionally final five-year term ends in 2009, but he has made no public pronouncement on suggestions that he stay on as ANC leader. BOOST FOR MBEKI The day before the Eastern Cape ANC gave Mbeki its support, a large group of ANC members staged a mass walkout during an Mbeki speech at the re-burial of an ANC hero in Pietermaritzburg in the Zulu heartland. Zuma's militant rank-and-file supporters, notably from communist, labour and youth allies of the ANC, have backed Zuma's charge that his sacking and a failed graft case against him were engineered by enemies in the party. Many Zuma supporters openly abused Mbeki during Zuma's court appearances. Zuma, who shared the stage with Mbeki in Pietermaritzburg in a show of ANC unity that has been rare since his sacking as vice-president, had to appeal to the crowd to show respect for the president. Mbeki cut short his speech -- his second humiliation in KwaZulu-Natal. He was heckled in Durban at a rally in September attended by visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. "Mbeki and Zuma are going to be competing to get the provinces to take a position on Mbeki or Zuma or another candidate for the next leader of the ANC," said political analyst Keith Gottschalk of the University of the Western Cape. "If Mbeki should win, there will be a further contest for who will be the country's president."
