(Updates with ANC comments)
JOHANNESBURG Feb 25 (Reuters) – Former South African
president Nelson Mandela was admitted to hospital on Saturday to
be treated for a “long-standing abdominal complaint”,
intensifying concerns about the health of the 93-year-old
anti-apartheid leader.
The government said Mandela needed specialist medical
treatment although the ruling African National Congress (ANC)
said his admission was not an emergency and did not involve
surgery.
“There’s no need for panic,” ANC spokesman Keith Khoza told
South Africa’s e-News channel. “It was not an emergency
admission. It was planned.”
An ANC source told Reuters that Mandela, who is popularly
known by his clan name, Madiba, was “not looking serious”.
Mandela has been in poor health since spending nearly a week
in Johannesburg’s Milpark hospital just over a year ago with
respiratory problems, and has not appeared in public since then.
He has spent the last year between his home in
Johannesburg’s northern suburbs and his ancestral village of
Qunu in the impoverished Eastern Cape.
As South Africa’s first black president, Mandela occupies a
central position in the psyche of a country that was ruled by
the 10 percent white minority until the first all-race elections
in 1994.
Earlier this month, President Jacob Zuma and the central
bank issued a new set of bank notes bearing his image.
Mandela has long since withdrawn from active participation
in politics and public life in Africa’s biggest economy, having
stood down at the end of his first term in office in 1999.
His last major public appearance was in July 2010 at the
final of the World Cup in Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium.
(Reporting by Ed Cropley and Peroshni Govender; Editing by
Janet Lawrence/Ruth Pitchford)
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