Archbishop Desmond Tutu has urged the ailing Nelson Mandela's family to end the bitter row regarding the reburial of three of his children.
"Please, please please may we think not only of ourselves. It's like spitting in Madiba's face," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a statement using Mandela's clan name.
The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate urged the family members to honor the name of the Madiba and not to "besmirch" it by fighting for the burial site.
Desmond said in the statement on Thursday, "Your anguish, now, is the nation's anguish - and the world's. We want to embrace you, to support you, to shine our love for Madiba through you".
Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe also expressed his hope that the public dispute over the burial site be resolved in a "dignified manner."
Following reports of the ailing Mandela being in a permanent vegetative condition, the South African President Jacob Zuma issued an official statement dismissing the media reports and reaffirming that Mandela was in "critical but stable condition."
"We confirm our earlier statement released this afternoon after President Jacob Zuma visited Madiba in hospital that Madiba remains in a critical, but stable condition," said the South African government in a statement on Thursday.
"The doctors deny that the former president is in a vegetative state," added the statement.
Nelson Mandela, the South African apartheid hero, was hospitalized in Pretoria earlier last month with lung infection. This is his third hospitalization in the last six months.
