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Trinidad and Tobago will play host for the next two days to Nelson Mandela, the living legend whose fight against apartheid in South Africa led to the dismantling of the then White supremacist Government's policy of racial segregation and won across the board political freedom for all South Africans. Mandela is scheduled to arrive at Piarco International Airport today in a plane piloted by a man who spent 15 years with him on Robben Island, Tokyo Sexwale. He will stay until Saturday.

And although Mandela will be in Trinidad and Tobago principally because he is on his way to Grenada to represent South Africa's request at the May 2 CONCACAF Congress that it be given Caribbean support in its bid to host World Cup 2010, so great is the stature of the man that he is being accorded an official visit. It will be a welcome with trappings, for the former South African President, traditionally afforded, but not limited to, visiting Heads of State. Official arrangements for his visit to Trinidad and Tobago, include being met on arrival at Piarco International Airport by Prime Minister Patrick Manning; his meeting with His Excellency, Professor George Maxwell Richards, President of TT, and Leader of the Opposition, Basdeo Panday, as well as being honoured, inter alia, by two cultural rallies. The first will be held at the Queen's Park Oval tomorrow, at which 10,000 schoolchildren are expected to meet him, and the second at Shaw Park, Tobago.

Mandela, accompanied by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and South Africa's Minister of Sport, Ngconde Balfour, will be paying his first visit to this country, although his second to the Caribbean. Although clearly happy to be visiting the Caribbean again he has made no secret about the purpose of his coming here. On Monday, Mandela who will be 86 on July 18, asked FIFA Vice President Jack Warner, to make South Africa's hosting of the World Cup in 2010 a birthday gift to him.

What must have been a crucial factor in the recognition and salute to Mandela's greatness by many countries and international dignitaries is that despite spending 27 long years in prison for his fight against racial segregation, and for indigenous South Africans to have the right to full equality of opportunity, he has never sought revenge. Amazingly, he is not a bitter man. Instead, as he would tell Warner, when the two met on Monday at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, his imprisonment had left him wiser rather than bitter. He was seeking, Mandela would point out to Warner, to "embody a new society rather than preside over the death of an old one."

Nelson Mandela's latest fight for South Africa, to bring World Cup 2010 there, will lead, if successful, to international focus on the positive social and economic changes in his country since the dismantling of apartheid. In turn, Mandela may be looking beyond just simply staging the World Cup, but rather using media attention to trigger both additional international confidence in the post-apartheid South Africa, and with it attract needed new investment. Newsday on behalf of its readers joins with the Government and CONCACAF and indeed the whole of Trinidad and Tobago in welcoming Nelson Mandela, a great man of this century.