The Nation Newspaper

Tag: President Jacob Zuma

  • Mandela turns 95 in hospital

    Mandela turns 95 in hospital

    Nelson Mandela is spending his 95th birthday in hospital in Pretoria, as events take place around the world and in South Africa in his honour, BBC reports.

    South Africans are being urged to mark the former president and anti-apartheid leader’s 67 years of public service with 67 minutes of charitable acts.

    Mr. Mandela, who is in critical but stable condition with a recurring lung infection, entered hospital on June 8.

    President Jacob Zuma said his health was “steadily improving.”

    “We are proud to call this international icon our own as South Africans and wish him good health,” Mr Zuma said in a statement.

    “We thank all our people for supporting Madiba throughout the hospitalisation with undying love and compassion,” he said, referring to Mandela’s clan name.

    Mr. Mandela’s daughter, Zindzi, said on Wednesday he had made “dramatic progress”, and that she had found him watching television with headphones on and communicating with his eyes and hands when she visited him this week.

    “I should think he will be going home anytime soon,” she told the UK’s Sky News television.

    Mr. Mandela’s birthday is also Nelson Mandela International Day, a day declared by the United Nations as a way to recognise the Nobel Prize winner’s contribution to reconciliation.

    The former statesman is revered across the world for his role in ending apartheid in South Africa. He went on to become the first black president in the country’s first all-race elections in 1994.

  • Mandela’s supporters hold all-night vigil

    Mandela’s supporters hold all-night vigil

    The crowd of well-wishers outside former President Nelson Mandela’s Pretoria hospital continues to grow as the health condition of the global statesman is said to be improving but still in “critical condition.”

    On Thursday, 15 buses filled with supporters arrived at the Mediclinic Heart Hospital, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.

    Throughout the night, crowds of people from all over the country were singing and praying in spite of the bitterly cold winter weather.

    They were given a glimmer of hope on Thursday when President Jacob Zuma who cancelled a trip to Mozambique to remain close, said there had been an improvement in his condition and that he remains in critical but stable condition.

    Relatives concurred with this, saying he was “responding to touch and attempting to open his eyes.”

    In spite of all the goodwill, Mandela’s eldest daughter Makaziwe Mandela on Thursday expressed her outrage at the media frenzy around her father, describing journalists reporting on her father’s deteriorating health conditions as “vultures.”

    “It’s like 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,’’ she said in an interview with the state broadcaster.

    She added that journalists who were camped outside her father’s Pretoria hospital and childhood village in the Eastern Cape “violate all boundaries.”