"He remains very sensitive to any germs, so he has to be kept literally sterile," Winnie Madikizela-Mandela told South Africa's Sunday Independent newspaper in an article published Sunday. "The bedroom there [at his home] is like an ICU ward."
Mandela, 95, "remains quite ill," she said, but doctors are tending to his needs at his residence in Houghton, a suburb of Johannesburg.
The tubes are used to prevent infection in Mandela, who is said to be stable.
"He communicates with the face, you see," Madikizela-Mandela told the newspaper. "But the doctors have told us they hope to recover his voice."
