SOWETO, April 4: Nelson Mandela urged South Africans on Sunday to back President Thabo Mbeki in April 14 elections, telling a mass rally his successor had done more for the country than any other leader in history.
The 85-year-old Nobel Peace laureate, in his only major campaign appearance this year, told some 100,000 supporters that Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC) was delivering on the promises of South Africa's post-apartheid democracy.
"No prime minister or president can claim to have done more for the people and the country than President Thabo Mbeki has done in these last five years," said Mandela, who was succeeded by Mbeki as president in 1999.
"You have a personal experience of the African National Congress government improving your lives, offering you the dignity that decades of apartheid and centuries of colonialism denied you," Mandela said.
The anti-apartheid icon drew huge cheers at the rally in a Soweto stadium as polls predicted a giant win for the ANC, which under Mandela led the country to cast off white rule in 1994.
Mbeki, virtually assured his second five-year term, would be inaugurated on April 27 - the tenth anniversary of South Africa's historic first democratic vote.
Mbeki said on Sunday the ANC would fight South Africa's many problems including widespread poverty, unemployment of as much as 40 percent, and the worst AIDS epidemic in the world. "When we say the people come first, we mean it," Mbeki told the crowd.
AIDS, POVERTY: The ANC has pledged to halve unemployment and poverty by 2014 and spend some 100 billion rand ($16 billion) on road, rail, air transport and telecommunications.
It has also begun providing anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS which infects an estimated one out of nine South Africans, and promised to boost policing to fight high crime rates which unnerve foreign investors and have led many wealthy South Africans to consider emigrating. -Reuters
