Saturday December 07, 2013
Kaieteur News
Page 25
SOUTH AFRICA MOURNS MANDELA, WILL BURY HIM ON DECEMBER 15
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africans united in mourning for Nelson Mandela yesterday, but while some celebrated his remarkable life with dance and song, others fretted that the anti-apartheid hero’s death would make the nation vulnerable again to racial and social tensions. President Jacob Zuma said Mandela would be buried on December 15 at his ancestral home in the Eastern Cape. South Africans heard from Zuma late on Thursday that their first black president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had died peacefully at his
Johannesburg home in the company of his family after a long illness. Yesterday, the country’s 52 million people absorbed the news that the statesman, a global symbol of reconciliation and peaceful co-existence, had departed forever. Zuma also announced Mandela would be honoured at a December 10 memorial service at Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium, the site of the 2010 World Cup final. “We will spend the week mourning his passing. We will also spend it celebrating a life well lived,” Zuma said. He added that Mandela
Osborne will need bigger axe to meet budget goal - IFS (Reuters) - Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will have to take a bigger axe to ministerial budgets or make further deep cuts to welfare to meet his target of a budget surplus before the end of the decade, a leading think-tank said. Osborne said on Thursday he was aiming for a surplus in 2018/19 and warned of tough choices ahead to achieve it. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said yesterday austerity would need to tighten even more to reach that goal. IFS director Paul Johnson said spending on central government public services - which exclude welfare - would have to be cut by 20 percent by 2018/19 from their level before Osborne began his austerity programme, deeper than the 8 percent reduction so far.
would be laid to rest at his ancestral village of Qunu, 700 km (450 miles) south of Johannesburg, in a plot where three of his children and other close family members are buried. Despite reassurances from public figures that Mandela’s death at 95, while sorrowful, would not halt South Africa’s advance from its apartheid past, there were those who expressed unease about the absence of a man famed as a peacemaker. “It’s not going to be good, hey! I think it’s going to become a more racist country. People will turn on each other and chase foreigners away,” said Sharon Qubeka, 28, a secretary from Tembisa township. “Mandela was the only one who kept things together.”Flags flew at half mast across the country, and trade was halted for five minutes on the Johannesburg stock exchange. But the mood was not all sombre. Hundreds filled the streets around Mandela’s home in the upmarket
Johannesburg suburb of Houghton, many singing songs of tribute and dancing. The crowd included toddlers carrying flowers, domestic workers still in uniform and businessmen in suits. Another veteran antiapartheid campaigner, former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, said that like all South Africans he was “devastated” by Mandela’s death. “Let us give him the gift of a South Africa united, one,” Tutu said, holding a mass in Cape Town’s St George’s Cathedral. Tributes continued to pour in for Mandela, who had been suffering for nearly a year from a recurring lung illness dating back to the 27 years he spent in apartheid jails, including the Robben Island penal colony. The flags of the 193 United Nations member states along First Avenue in Manhattan, New York were lowered at 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) in honour of Mandela.
The U.N. General Assembly observed a minute of silence. The loss was also keenly felt across the African continent. “We are in trouble now, Africa. No one will fit Mandela’s shoes,” said Kenyan teacher Catherine Ochieng, 32. Former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, an old ally of Mandela’s in the fight against apartheid, hailed him
as “a great freedom fighter”. For South Africa, the death of its most loved leader comes at a time when the nation, which basked in global goodwill after apartheid ended, has been experiencing labour unrest, growing protests against poor services, poverty, crime and unemployment and corruption scandals tainting Zuma’s rule.