Since stepping down as South African president five years ago, Nelson Mandela has joked of being a retired pensioner, but that was only true from yesterday.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg is expected to announce a drastic scaling down of his commitments to allow him to spend more time with his family, and reportedly to complete his memoirs.
Mandela will not completely vanish from public life but his hectic schedule of daily engagements, from raising funds for charity to bolstering government diplomacy, is to end.
The man South Africans know by his clan name, Madiba, turns 86 next month and is a frail figure compared to the one who strode from prison in 1990 to shepherd the country from apartheid to multiracial democracy.
"We are all looking forward to Madiba's retirement," the foundation said. "We want him to get more rest because he has been doing too many things. We are looking after him like a father."
His wife, Graca Machel, is understood to have pushed for him to turn his self-deprecating line about being an unemployed pensioner into reality.
Last month he told a South African journalist: "I may not have many years left to live. I have been told to scale down my activities by the end of the month."
He has squeezed as much as possible into the past few weeks, giving a swansong address to the opening of parliament, flying to Zurich to help in clinching South Africa's bid to host the 2010 World Cup and then on to Spain for the royal wedding.
He used a meeting with boxing promoter Don King last week to offer an olive branch of sorts to US President George W. Bush, saying that the US had a positive international role to play despite the Iraq war, which he condemns.
Yesterday he opened the Rebatla Thuto secondary school in the Free State, one of at least 140 partly funded by three foundations that bear his name.
Mandela's fundraising efforts -- phoning businesspeople informally to make a request for donations -- known in South Africa as his "breakfast calls" -- have raised millions to combat HIV-AIDS. But officials acknowledged funding may slacken if it is not Mandela making the call.
But a spokesman for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) welcomed the news that its former leader would slow down.
"We still need him in our midst, and anything that can help him strengthen his health is welcomed by us," Smuts Ngonyama said.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, too, will be relieved if his predecessor curtails his comments on combating HIV-AIDS, an epidemic ravaging the country, and which Mbeki is accused of neglecting.
However, Mandela might sting the president if his time off allows him to complete the second part of his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, covering his 1994 to 1999 term in office and Mbeki's subsequent rule. But few expect a hatchet job from a loyal party man who once said the first thing he would do in heaven would be to join the local ANC branch.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS