DOCTORS URGE MANDELA'S FAMILY TO PULL THE PLUG DUE TO "PERMANENT VEGETATIVE STATE"

NELSON MANDELA

Doctors urged Nelson Mandela’s feuding family to pull the plug on the ailing anti-apartheid hero more than a week ago after concluding he was in a “permanent vegetative state,” according to court papers released yesterday.
The South African government quickly denied that the country’s first black president was in an irreversible coma, saying current President Jacob Zuma had visited Mandela in the hospital, where he’s in “critical but stable condition.”
“The doctors deny that the former president is in a vegetative state,” the government statement said.
Mandela, 94, has been hospitalized nearly a month for treatment of a recurring lung infection.
The June 26 court filing, obtained by Agence France-Presse, said the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize laureate “is in a permanent vegetative state and is assisted in breathing by a life-support machine.”
“The Mandela family have been advised by the medical practitioners that his life-support machine should be switched off,” the document says. "Rather than prolonging his suffering, the Mandela family is exploring this option as a very real probability."
The document was filed with the High Court of South Africa by 15 Mandela family members, including his wife and three daughters, as part of a bitter feud over where Mandela will be buried.
As a result, Mandela’s three dead children were reburied yesterday in their original graves in Qunu, where Mandela grew up and has said he wants to be buried.
Grandson Mandla Mandela had moved the bodies to his village of Mvezo — Nelson Mandela’s birthplace — in 2011 in what the other family members called a “self-serving” effort to control his grandfather’s final resting place.
“He knows that it has always been the wish of Mr. Nelson Mandela to be buried alongside his children and grandchildren,” court papers charged.
“By controlling the area in which these descendants’ remains are buried, he expects that the remains of Mr. Nelson Mandela will be buried.”
The three bodies were exhumed Wednesday after a sheriff used a pickax to force open the gates of Mandla’s estate so three hearses could enter the property.
In a nationally televised news conference yesterday, Mandla — Mandela’s oldest male heir and a tribal chief — lashed out at his rival relatives, who he said had attacked him for “a few minutes of fame and media attention at my expense.”
He stunningly accused one of his brothers of impregnating his wife and others of being born out of wedlock, including Ndaba Mandela, who had made the same charge against him.
“I don’t want to hang out our dirty linen as a family in public, but he knows very well that my father impregnated a married woman of which he is the result of that act,” Mandla said.
“As for the remaining of my two brothers, we all know that they are not my father’s children.”
A representative for Mandela’s wife, Graca Machel, declined to comment on the court filing, but earlier in the day, Machel insisted her husband was “fine.”