"TOO MUCH A SAINT"

Since his withdrawal from public life, he has divided his time between his plush Johannesburg home and Qunu, the village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province where he was born and spent his early years.

Mandela spent nearly three weeks in hospital in December with a lung infection and after surgery to remove gallstones.

That was his longest stay in hospital since his release from prison in 1990 after serving almost three decades behind bars or on the Robben Island prison camp near Cape Town for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government.

His history of lung problems dates back to his years on Robben Island, where he contracted tuberculosis.

Although he remains widely revered, Mandela is not without detractors at home and in the rest of Africa who feel he made too many concessions to whites, who make up just 10 percent of the population, in the post-apartheid settlement.

Despite more than 10 years of affirmative action policies aimed at redressing the balance, South Africa remains one of the world's most unequal societies with whites still controlling much of the economy.

On average a white household earns six times more than a black one.

"Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of (blacks)," Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, 89, said in a documentary aired on South African television this month.

"That's being too saintly, too good, too much of a saint."