F.W. de Klerk, the last president of white-ruled South Africa, is recovering from respiratory problems suffered after a cancer operation but remains on a ventilator, his spokesman said yesterday.

“The prognosis is good, he is making steady progress,” Dave Steward told Reuters. It is up to the doctors now to decide when to take him off the ventilator and to release him for intensive care”.

De Klerk, 70, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for his efforts to end apartheid and establish a multi-racial democracy, had a malignant tumour removed from his colon earlier this month.

Doctors at Cape Town’s Panorama Medi-Clinic placed him on a ventilator last Wednesday after he had difficulty breathing. A second operation on Thursday found no abnormalities and his condition slowly began to improve. Steward said De Klerk was still under sedation but had been conscious a couple of times.

De Klerk, a former heavy smoker, ousted hardliner P.W. Botha in 1989 and stunned the world months later with a sweeping repudiation of the apartheid racial segregation policies of his National Party.

He lifted a 30-year-old ban on Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and bans on other groups and freed Mandela from prison, paving the way for a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy. De Klerk served as deputy president under Mandela in a “government of national unity” after the ANC won the country’s first all-race vote in 1994. He retired from active politics in 1997.