You need to apply a patch to the source that has been available for (about 9 months). The gnu ftp site (and its mirrors) do not have any of the patches online, so you have to go straight to the home ftp site for ncurses. Following is the address to the patch directory on Thomas Dickey's ftp server:

ftp://dickey.his.com/ncurses/patches/

The simplest way to apply the patch is to grab the lastest "rollup" patch that the author (Thomas Dickey) has made. Once a month, he takes all of the latest patches and creates a shell script that will update the source. The way that you do this is to untar and gunzip the ncurses download, gnunzip the patch, then copy the patch to the ncurses directory (the one that resulted from untaring and gunziping it), then running it by typing sh <patch name>.

Then do configure --prefix=/usr/local --mandir=/usr/local/share/man; make; make install.

It will compile and install without a hitch.

You really should have ncurses installed for whenever you compile a terminal program. BSD curses (the standard libcurses and curses.h) are really very buggy, especially if you are doing programming. Moreover, ncurses does quite a bit more and almost every terminal based program will take advantage of it.