LUANDA - Angola's ruling party is likely to strengthen its tight grip when the booming oil-producing nation and emerging African heavyweight holds its first election since the end of a 27-year civil war on Friday.

Angola hopes the parliamentary election, the first in 16 years, will set an example after flawed polls elsewhere in Africa to demonstrate the OPEC member's transformation from conflict-scarred backwater to attractive frontier market.

Despite concerns about corruption and the growing gap between rich and poor, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in power since independence from Portugal in 1975, faces little challenge from a divided and underfunded opposition.

"The question that remains is whether it will attain the two-thirds majority, which would enable it to make unilateral changes to the constitution if so desired," said Indira Campos, a researcher at London-based think-tank Chatham House.

The MPLA currently has 129 seats in the 220-seat parliament. The rest are largely held by former rebel group UNITA, which was defeated in 2002 and is now the main opposition party.

An MPLA landslide would clear the way for Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos to contest -- and almost certainly win -- a presidential election next year. Dos Santos, a former Marxist and liberation-era fighter, has hinted he wants to extend his 29-year rule.

"I am the president of the MPLA and I am also a player," Dos Santos recently said, signalling his intentions.

Dos Santos beat UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi in the 1992 election. Savimbi cried foul and the bush war resumed. An estimated half a million people died in the conflict, which ended after Savimbi was killed in an ambush in 2002.

The government claims credit for rebuilding a country twice the size of Texas and working to raise the living standards of its 17 million people, two-thirds of whom live on $2 a day.

BOOM

Oil production has more than doubled since the end of the war to about two million barrels per day and Angola rivals Nigeria as Africa's top oil producer. It joined OPEC in 2007.

Angola is the biggest oil exporter to China and has also won billions of dollars in Chinese investment.

Gross domestic grew more than 24 percent in 2007 compared to an average of 5.7 percent in Africa. There are plans to open a stock market by early 2009 and the government is trying to get a B+ credit rating from a top agency to attract more investors.

Few Angolans have yet to see tangible benefits from the boom, however.

"There continues to be a big gap between the very rich and the very poor and that gap will not be narrowed in two or three years but maybe 15 years," said Vikea Cambulo of Agostinho Neto University in Benguela. "I think things can change if politicians are tested every four years from now but it all depends how these first elections go."

UNITA is expected to get the support of part of Angola's largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu, while the MPLA has its ethnic base among the Mbundu.

But more significant are the voters in the slums of the ethnically-mixed Portuguese speaking capital of Luanda, where almost one-third of the 8.3 million eligible voters live.

Opposition party UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), led by Isaias Samakuva, is urging voters to embrace political change, which it says is needed to fight widespread poverty, high unemployment and other social problems.

It has also complained that the ruling MPLA party is getting too much free publicity from state-owned media and of low-level attacks on its supporters in the campaign, an allegation supported by Human Rights Watch.

"Less than a month before elections, it's clear Angolans aren't able to campaign free from intimidation or pressure," Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, recently said. "Unless things change now, Angolans won't be able to cast their votes freely."

But there are no signs Angola could descend into the violence that marred elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya.

For the oil industry and others in the business community, the stability and continuity is just fine.

"We are pumping like crazy," said an executive with a foreign oil firm on condition of anonymity. "If the elections go well and the MPLA wins, that will further increase investor confidence in Angola's economy."