Nelson Mandela unable to speak

 
Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela’s conditions is still critical and the anti-apartheid icon is unable speak, using facial expressions to communicate as he receives intensive medical care at his home, in Johannesburg.

Mandela, 95, is under the care of 22 medical doctors who work around the clock to ensure that the former South African president’s health improves.

Speaking in Johannesburg after visiting her former husband, Winnie Madikizela Mandela said, “He remains “quite ill” and is unable to speak, using facial expressions to communicate.”

Ms Winnie said the 95-year-old was not on life support but was no longer talking “because of all the tubes that are in his mouth to clear (fluid from) the lungs”.

“He can’t actually articulate anything” as a result, she told South Africa’s Sunday Independent newspaper. “He communicates with the face, you see. But the doctors have told us they hope to recover his voice.”

Mandela was discharged on September 1 to his home in Johannesburg’s upmarket Houghton suburb after nearly three months in hospital for a lung infection.

“I have heard this nonsense that he is on life support. He is not,” Madikizela-Mandela said.

According to Winnie, her ex-husband is under the care of 22 doctors, and while his pneumonia has cleared, his lungs remain sensitive, she said.

“It is difficult for him,” said Winnie adding, “He remains very sensitive to any germs, so he has to be kept literally sterile. The bedroom there (in Houghton) is like an ICU ward.”

“He remains quite ill, but thank God the doctors were able to pull him through from that (last) infection,” she said.

Mandela, who spent 27 years in apartheid jail before becoming South Africa’s first black leader, has faced several health scares.

His most recent hospital stay was his longest since he walked free in 1990. Mandela was in “an atmosphere he recognises,” Madikizela-Mandela said.

“When he is very relaxed, he is fine and it has given us a lot of hope.”

Background

Anti-apartheid leader returned to his home in September 1, this year where he has continued to receive intensive care after spending three months in hospital with a lung ailment.

He had spent 87 days in a Pretoria hospital after he was rushed there in early June suffering from a recurring infection of the lungs, a legacy of the nearly three decades he spent in jail under apartheid.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s latest hospitalisation in June had attracted a wave of attention and sympathy at home and across the world.

His home in Johannesburg’s Houghton suburb had been “reconfigured” to allow him to receive special care there, the presidency added. Police blocked off a section of the street in the upscale neighborhood, where a crowd of reporters and camera crews had gathered.

Mandela made his last public appearance waving to fans from the back of a golf cart before the Soccer World Cup final in Johannesburg in 2010. In April, this year, state broadcaster aired a clip of the thin and frail statesman being visited by President Jacob Zuma and top officials from the African National Congress.

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 CITIZEN