Mandela’s condition critical, but stable: Zuma

“He is much better today than he was when I saw him last night. The medical team continues to do a sterling job,” Zuma said in a statement.

After visiting Mandela for a second time in 24 hours, Zuma urged South Africans to pray for the 94-year-old former president.
Zuma “was informed by the medical team that Madiba’s condition has improved during the course of the night. He remains critical but is now stable,” the presidency said.

“We must pray for Tata’s (father’s) health and wish him well. We must also continue with our work and daily activities while Madiba remains hospitalised,” Zuma said.
The presidency also urged people to refrain from spreading rumours about the man many South Africans regard as the father of their nation, amid numerous false reports of his death.

United States President Barack Obama has described the former South African leader as a “hero for the world” during a visit to the Senegalese capital Dakar.
“If or when Mandela passes away, his legacy will linger on through the ages,” Obama said in front of 400 journalists at Dakar’s presidential palace.
Obama will today travel to South Africa, where Mandela is critically ill in hospital.

As the world attention remains focused on the apartheid icon, Mandela’s oldest daughter Makaziwe yesterday slammed the “crass” media frenzy around her critically ill father, likening the press to vultures.

Makaziwe accused the foreign media of “a racist element” by crossing cultural boundaries and being a “nuisance” at her father’s Pretoria hospital where he is on life support.
“It’s like truly vultures waiting when a lion has devoured a buffalo, waiting there you know for the last carcasses, that’s the image that we have as a family,” Makaziwe Mandela told the state broadcaster SABC.

“And we don’t mind the interest but I just think that it has gone overboard.”
As well as staking out the hospital, journalists had also camped out during the family’s visit this week to Mandela’s childhood village, in the rural Eastern Cape.

“They violate all boundaries,” she said.
“Is it because we’re an African country that people just feel they can’t respect any laws of this country, they can violate everything in the book? I just think it’s in bad taste, it’s crass”, she said. Updates on Mandela’s health are strictly controlled via the South African presidency but this has not stopped hordes of foreign and local media flocking to his hospital, village of Qunu and his Johannesburg home.

Mandela said her father’s status as a global icon did not mean that his privacy and dignity should not be respected.
“Tata (father) deserves his privacy and dignity and this family deserves that,” she said.

“And if people say they really care about Nelson Mandela, then they should respect that, then they should respect that there’s a part of him that has to be respected.
“It doesn’t mean that everything of his has to be out there in the public. I don’t think so, I don’t agree with that . . . (the) UK government was not giving gory details on day to day basis on Margaret Thatcher’s illness. Not with Ronald Reagan either”, Makaziwe said. — AFP.