There can be no justfication for the reported excesses and acts of violence allegedly committed by some members and/or agents of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF Party in the party's attempts to hold on to power.

Additionally, it is unfortunate that Mugabe's earlier fight for the political freedom and economic advancement of Zimbabwe should now be scarred.

Internet chat rooms went into libellous overdrive slandering Mugabe in his professional and personal capacity based on little or incorrect information and unfortunately Malaysians felt that that they too are entitled to skew in analysis and facts.

Malaysia political crisis is in no way to be compared to Zimbabwe’s. Malaysians should appreciate the fact that Western powers aren't poring over their domestic affairs in view of a regime change and or recolonisation which is precisely the case in Zimbabwe.

But while I understand Mugabe’s fears of what he clearly perceives to be an attempt to return Zimbabwe to an Ian Smith-type rule, nonetheless, I have reservations about his government's and party's reported actions.

I still believe, however, that Mugabe was right in his government's retaking of Zimbabwe's arable land which had been forcibly seized by white settlers following the one-sided Land Ordinances by the colonial administration of then Southern Rhodesia.

Jeffrey Herbst in his State Politics in Zimbabwe , published in 1990 by the University of California Press, has stated, emphatically, that these Land Ordinances ‘guaranteed white economic domination and black poverty during the 90-year colonial period’.

So unjust was the system that Carl K Eicher tells us in his Zimbabwe's Maize-based Green Revolution: Preconditions for Replication. World Development , that when Iindependence was secured for Zimbabwe in 1980, some half of the country's best agricultural land was under the control of 5,000 settler farms, and the remainder in the possession of 700,000 Zimbabwean farmers! I have said this before, but it needs retelling.

In an earlier British-controlled Southern Rhodesia, as in other areas of colonised Africa, ‘dominant expatriate interests’ got the colonial administration to ‘block the development of a fully capitalist system in order to create a structure of servile dependency which would maximise monopoly interests’. (EA Brett Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change ,1973, Heinemann).

The result was that ‘the great mass of (African) peasantry (was) consigned irrevocably to the bottom’.

In turn, Walter Rodney would point out on page 229 of his famous work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa , that East African financial institutions - banks and insurance companies - were employed to protect ‘colonial expatriate interests’ and cut short the development of African economic power. Rodney cited, for example, The Credit to Natives (Restriction) Ordinance, 1931.

Nevertheless, the blatant racial discrimination against Zimbabweans and other colonised Africans did not cease with their gaining political independence. When Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, insisted on ending the racially motivated imbalances of history and restore to indigenous Zimbabweans the arable land that had been arbitrarily seized by white settler farmers, there was an immediate European economic backlash.

The United Kingdom, for example, slashed its imports from Zimbabwe and today imports a scant two to two and a half percent of Zimbabwean products. Had it not been for South Africa, which accounts for more than half of Zimbabwe's exports, and the Congo, which accounts for a shade above six percent, Zimbabwe would not have been to pay for imports of needed goods and services, including medicines.

Zimbabwe is still being punished, economically, not for the governing party's treatment of the Oopposition, but for its struggles for independence and, above all, for restoring the country's arable land to indigenous Zimbabweans.

Its main exports - tobacco, horticulture, gold, nickel and ferro alloys - clearly do not provide enough foreign exchange to pay for the machinery, vehicular spares, chemicals and food it desperately needs.

Let us, for the record, examine the Gross Domestic Product of some former African colonies, along with Zimbabwe, in relation to the size of their populations and appreciate that the attitude of the West to them is rooted in making them pay the penalty for being politically independent.

Kenya with a population of approximately 32 million has a Gross Domestic Product of some US$13.8 billion;

• Zimbabwe (13 million) US$17.8 billion;

I introduce a factor which has had the effect of retarding the economic progress of all too many Third World countries, including Zimbabwe - the Law of the First Price.