Post date: Sep 03, 2013 1:21:29 PM
South African President Jacob Zuma says Nelson Mandela is still critical but responding to treatment.
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA (SEPTEMBER 3, 2013) (REUTERS) - Nelson Mandela's return home after nearly three months in hospital shows the fragile health of anti-apartheid hero has made some improvement, President Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday (September 3).
Zuma also told a news conference that the 95-year-old former South African president remained in a critical but stable condition and was responding to treatment.Mandela returned to his Johannesburg home on Sunday (September 1) after spending 87 days in aPretoria hospital for a recurring lung infection, a legacy of the nearly three decades he spent in jail as a political prisoner under apartheid.
"The father of our democracy, Tata Madiba, left hospital for his home. He is now at his home where he is receiving the care from the same team looked after him at the hospital. He remains critical but stable, responding to treatment. I think we feel very good that he reached a point where the doctors treating him felt that he could now leave the hospital to his home. Which indicates the progress he had made. So I'm very happy, I'm sure we are all wishing him a speedy recovery. We acknowledge that he is old and that he is not well but we are very happy that he has gone home. And that he is still with us," Zuma said.
He will be receiving the same level of care at his house, which has been kitted out with intensive care medical facilities, the government has said.
Zuma said it was up to the family to decide where Mandela would be best cared for.
"I think his family have the final word on what must happen to Madiba. Whether he goes to Qunu or not or what happens, the family will say so. I think the family will understand Madiba's wishes as it was traditionally. I don't think it's a matter that you can say as government that this is what must be done. It is just like where Madiba should be buried. You can't say it just because he was our president he must be buried in the heroes acre. The family must say we want to bury him here. Or he might have said it himself. It is not an easy matter," said Zuma addressing questions about Madiba's return to his home town of Qunu.
"If you come to the medical side, if you are in Houghton, and your health is not perfect and there is any emergency to reach any hospital near Johannesburg or Pretoria is a matter of minutes. If you are in Qunu and there was an emergency what are you going to do? Which is the nearest? If in the nearest - does it have all the necessary things you might need? So there are those questions that I am sure people who are wanting to decide what happens to Madiba they must take into consideration," he added.
For more than a decade Mandela has been out of politics, dividing his time in retirement between his home in Houghton and Qunu, the village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province where he was born.
His admission to hospital four times in six months has reminded the nation of the mortality of the father of the post-apartheid "Rainbow Nation" and the morals he stood for.
The anti-apartheid leader was elected South Africa's first black president in multi-racial elections in 1994 that ended white minority rule.
Mandela's imprisonment included 18 years on the notorious Robben Island penal colony, when he and other prisoners were forced to work in a limestone quarry and he first suffered the lung infections that were to dog him for years.