By Precious Shumba| Compensating white commercial farmers who lost the farms they had illegally occupied during colonisation is not the best policy for Zimbabwe.

The white commercial farmers had taken our land by force and they forced our ancestors to go and live in regions with poor rainfall patterns, infested with tsetse flies, and they even imposed multiple taxes on the indigenous Zimbabweans as they ensured that the blacks did not produce on their land.

They sought cheap labour and they made the blacks to work in order to pay the taxes. The repossession of the land was necessary, and the accompanying violence did not affect only the white commercial farmers but the black farm labourers as well as perceived Government opponents. Will these be compensated as well?

The strategy being adopted by the Zimbabwe Government of pleasing the western world at the detriment of Zimbabweans is misguided and should be rejected as a reversal of the gains made on the land resettlement programme. Britain should pay the white commercial farmers who were dispossessed of farms that they had illegally occupation during the racist driven occupation of Zimbabwe in 1890.

The President must not buckle under pressure from the west. His desperation to be accepted by the USA and the EU will in the long term create a weaker State. Of course Zimbabwe needs to be admitted into the world of nations, but not through betraying the black majority who suffered under a racist policy driven by a minority white population under colonial rule.

In light of these moves, President Emmerson Mnangagwa is showing himself to be a puppet of the West and open to manipulation because of perceived business opportunities and lines of credit that will come to Zimbabwe. The reality is that western capital interests will prevail and they will bring more suffering matching the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s which was inspired by the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.