The ANC has morphed from its earlier transition days as a ‘modern’ bourgeois political party designed to consolidate a class-based system of power overlaid with narrow racial interests to an inveterately factionalised, patronage-centred, corrupt, rent seeking and increasingly undemocratic ex-liberation movement.

When viewed in the overall historical context of the 300 years of free labour building Britain during the slavery and colonial period, the 400 million pounds UK is offering the Caribbean as presumably an alternative payment for reparations is simply laughable. There remains a case for reparatory justice.

A lot has been achieved through the principled stand of the members of the shack-dwellers movement, with some of them paying the ultimate price for justice and freedom. Several other individuals and partner organisations have been an important part of the journey. The struggle continues.

In May the ruling party claimed to have won an incredible 100 per cent of the seats in a country that has nearly 80 political parties that contested the elections. And the regime’s allies around the world keep churning out reports of rapid economic development – while turning a blind eye to the widespread repression by the dictatorship.

A committed revolutionary from his youth, Risquet led the Cuban delegation in the talks that resulted in the withdrawal of the apartheid army from southern Angola and the liberation of neighboring Namibia under settler-colonial occupation for a century. His last visit to Africa was in 2012 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah’s death.