Mandela "Still There", Daughter Says

"I'm not going to lie, but I think that for us as his children and grandchildren we still have this hope because, you know, when we talk to him he will flutter, trying to open his eyes and open his eyes. When you touch him he still responds, and I think, for us, as his progeny as long as Tata is still responding when we talk to him, when we touch him, I think that gives us hope," Makaziwe said.Mandela's daughter also said the family felt that the media which are camped outside the hospital were overstepping the mark, angrily describing them as vultures.

"Actually they are standing right there in the aisle you can't even enter hospital or you can't even go out of the hospital because they are making themselves such a nuisance. It's like truly vultures, waiting when the lion has devoured the buffalo, waiting there to, you know, the last carcass. That's the image that we have as a family and we don't mind interest, but I just think it has gone overboard," she said.

"Why do they want to know the nature on a day-to-day basis what's happening. Tata deserves his privacy and dignity, and this family deserves it. If people did say they really cared about Nelson Mandela then they should respect it. Then they should respect that there is a part of him that has to be respected. It doesn't mean that everything of is has to be out there in the public, I don't think so, I don't agree with it," she added.

Mandela's condition improved overnight and is now "stable" while still critical, a government statement said on Thursday.

It followed a visit by President Jacob Zuma - his second in the past 24 hours - to the anti-apartheid hero in a Pretoria hospital, where he is being treated for a lung infection.

Mandela's fourth hospitalisation in six months has forced a growing realisation among South Africans that the man regarded as the father of their post-apartheid "Rainbow Nation" will not be among them for ever.

Mandela is revered for his lifetime of opposition to the system of race-based apartheid rule imposed by the white minority government that sentenced him to 27 years in jail, more than half of them on notorious Robben Island.

He is also respected for the way he preached reconciliation after the 1994 transition to multi-racial democracy following three centuries of white domination.

Well-wishers' messages, bouquets and stuffed animals have piled up outside Mandela's Johannesburg home and the wall of the hospital compound where he is being treated in the capital.

Mandela stepped down in 1999 after one five-year term in office. Since then he has played little role in public life, dividing his time in retirement between his home in the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Houghton and Qunu, the village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province where he was born.