The Ghana Institution of Surveyors (GhIS) has been tasked to release a fit-for-purpose approach to the country’s land challenges.
The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), Joseph Boahen Aidoo, made the call while delivering a speech as a special guest of honour during the investiture of a new President of the GhIS at the Fantasy Dome, Trade Fair Centre last Saturday in Accra.
“For me, this fit-for-purpose approach is the game-changer and probably what you have termed transformation,” he said.
The investiture of the new president was part of a weeklong series of activities constituting the 18th Surveyors’ Week & 54th Annual General Meeting between February 18 and 26, 2023. The theme for this year’s activities is: “Transforming Land Administration in Ghana – The Role of the Professional Surveying Professional.”
Mr. Aidoo noted that litigation and landguardism are the causes of tenure insecurity in the country, adding that “the lack of certainty of ownership in most parts of the country and incomplete and erroneous official records on land ownership are significant reasons for litigation and landguardism.”
According to him, there is “considerable reliance on memory and oral testimonies to assert ownership of land where things are conflicting.”
Land, he went on, is finite yet “our attitudes and conduct to land here in Ghana make it look limitless.”
He expressed concern about the disregard for the interests of future generations in the manner in which land is managed in the country.
Such disregard, he said, is driven by selfishness, adding “it is high time this narrative is changed.”
Mr. Aidoo lamented the situation in the country where as he put it 75% of the nation’s population has no access to formal system to register and safeguard their land rights.
He asked for the building of affordable, easily accessible and sustainable system for identification of land and how it is used.
In his post-investiture speech as the new President of the GhIS, Surv Alhaji Daud Sulemana Mahama said Ghana has reached a phase in her development where land “is increasingly assuming renewed significance.”
Such significance, he went on, can be found “in the revamping and modernising agriculture to ensure food security and providing raw materials for agro-led industrialisation, providing affordable housing for the rapidly bulging population, effectively managing urbanisation and its concomitant challenges such as sprawling and emergence of slums or improving revenue mobilisation among others.”
If there is any group of professionals better equipped to influence “our development discourse as a nation, then it should be the Ghanaian Surveyor,” he added.
Surveyors, he said, “cannot aspire to play a lead role in changing things if we do not have the knowledge and capacity to do so. That is why we need to work collectively with zest, zeal, passion and drive as we reorganise and reposition the Ghanaian Institution of Surveyors for the growing complexities of the modern society.”
Surv Alhaji Daud Sulemana Mahama’s tenure is for a year, and he took over from Surv Rosemargaret Esubonteng.
By A.R. Gomda