Mandela: 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 conditi

on.

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.”