While working from within the system, she earned the respect of Nelson Mandela, who praised her courage and credited her with helping to alleviate conditions of incarceration. Always outspoken and independent, she spoke out against the regime but at times opposed Mandela's policies. She opposed economic sanctions as counter productive and harmful to poor blacks. After Mandela's release "she was prominent among those ... who persuaded him to drop the ANC's revolutionary program in favour of an evolutionary one, retaining a market economy and a parliamentary democracy." She continued to be a critic after the fall of Apartheid. She was critical of Mandela when he praised dictator Muammar Gaddafi as a supporter of human rights. According to her biographer, Lord Robin Renwick, before and after the ANC came to power, she continued to speak out against those in power who would "put party and state above the individual whether black or white".