Four land institutions to harmonise operations

Daily Graphic, back page, Sat. March 21/09

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

THE operations of four existing public service land institutions are to be harmonised to streamline land administration and avoid the acrimony and frustrations associated with land acquisition, ownership and use in the country.
The project, dubbed ‘The Land Administration Project’ (LAP), which will merge the operations of the Land Valuation Board, the Survey Department, the Land Title Registration and the Lands Commission, into a single institution to be known as the Lands Commission, received presidential accent in December last year under a new Lands Commission Act 2008 (Act 767).
The act seeks to consolidate about 166 land-related legislation and sources in the country into a single document to allow for easy reference and systematic land administration.
The new Lands Commission, which will be inaugurated soon, will have under it, a Survey and Mapping, Land Registration, Land Valuation and Public and Vested Lands Management divisions.
The Director, Human Resources, Finance and Administration, of the Land Valuation Board (LVB), Mr Mark Bayor, said this at a national delegates conference of the Public Service Workers Union (PSWU) of the LVB in Accra on Thursday.
He said the move would help to put to rest the issue of land guards and double registration of lands and would also bring sanity into land administration in the country.
The congress, which was on the theme: “Land Valuation Board in Land Administration Project (LAP), prospects and challenges", was aimed at electing new members to the PSWU and also to brief the delegates on what the LVB stands to gain in the harmonisation of the four institutions into one entity.
Mr Bayor, who called on workers of the LVB to brace themselves for a new and better opportunity, however, called on them to put away their old attitudes towards work such as lateness, laziness and idling about, in order to ensure that the new Lands Commission lived up to expectation.
He said the LAP was a Government of Ghana’s programme with support from six donor institutions to implement the National Lands Policy launched in 1999 and that the LAP was inaugurated in 2003 with the first phase of five years estimated to cost $55.5 million.
He said under the LAP, activities of the merging institutions had been streamlined thus facilitating some existing functions such as the revaluation and inventory taking of state acquired lands.
He, however, stated that the merger would cause a possible redeployment of some staff of the merging institutions including the LVB and, therefore, called for the provision of packages that would sustain the affected staff to avoid any unforeseen eventualities.
The Secretary General of the Ghana TUC, Mr Kofi Asamoah, who addressed the participants, said the successful implementation of the LAP would put to rest some of the difficulties that the nation faced in terms of land administration.
He said it was imperative for the LVB to train its staff so that they would be able to function properly in order to meet the standards of professionalism, competence and moral uprightness envisaged under the project.
He also called on the implementing agents of the LAP to ensure that the conditions of service of staff who would be transferred to the new commission would not be adversely affected.
He suggested that workers who would be retired should be made to receive severance awards due them.
Mr Asamoah further noted that the promulgation of the new act brought to an end, the unnecessary ambiguity regarding unionisation of staff of the land institutions, saying that the act emphasised the fact that the Lands Commission was a public service, thereby putting to rest the question of unionisation.
He gave the assurance that the GTUC would do everything possible to ensure that the legitimate interest of the affected staff of the LVB were not sacrificed during the implementation of the project.