The question of land ownership had deep emotional resonance in Kenya, having been a major grievance against the British colonialists. As part of the Lancaster House negotiations, Britain's government agreed to provide Kenya with £27 million with which to buy out white farmers and redistribute their land among the indigenous population. To ease this transition, Kenyatta made Bruce McKenzie, a white farmer, the Minister of Agriculture and Land. Kenyatta's government encouraged the establishment of private land-buying companies that were often headed by prominent politicians. The government sold or leased lands in the former White Highlands to these companies, which in turn subdivided them among individual shareholders. In this way, the land redistribution programs favoured the ruling party's chief constituency. Kenyatta himself expanded the land that he owned around Gatundu. Kenyans who made claims to land on the basis of ancestral ownership often found the land given to other people, including Kenyans from different parts of the country. Voices began to condemn the redistribution; in 1969, the MP Jean-Marie Seroney censured the sale of historically Nandi lands in the Rift to non-Nandi, describing the settlement schemes as "Kenyatta's colonization of the rift".