A statue honoring former president Nelson Mandela has been defaced in Brits by masked vandals who spray-painted his legs with white lettering, police said on Tuesday. Police in the town of Brits, north of Johannesburg, said that two men wearing balaclavas spray-painted the six-metre-high fibreglass figure on Sunday night, scrawling the letters RSA over its lower half. The statue, painted bronze and showing Mandela dancing, was hired by butcher Neels van Rensburg to advertise his Madiba Butchery during the town’s annual festival.