Lands Commission to digitize land acquisition to reduce corruption and litigation
Lands Commission aims to reduce litigation, corruption and bureaucracy in land acquisition with digitization
The Lands Commission is digitising land acquisition processes as part of revolutionizing land ownership in Ghana in order to overcome the corruption associated with buying and owning land in the country.
This revelation was made by Jones Ofori-Boadu, the Deputy Executive Secretary in charge of Corporate Services at the commission.
Giving further details in a TV interview, Ofori-Boadu pointed out that his outfit has been “able to digitize a portion of Accra”.
“We have taken Accra as a pilot project and we are looking at four registration districts. We are doing this as a proof of concept to show that it can be done,” the deputy executive secretary added.
Last year, Ghana’s Parliament passed a bill intended to harmonize all existing legal provisions regarding land ownership in the country. The Land Act (2019) is also supposed to give new and improved powers to the commission to address long-standing problems in Ghanaian land ownership.
These novel efforts are seen by the commission as the panacea to accusations of corruption as well as bureaucratic processes that Ofori-Boadu himself described in the interview as “cumbersome”.
“Land acquisition has been a bit controversial and I will also say that some of the processes that you have to go through to perfect your title to land have been a bit cumbersome and we are trying to address it,” he confessed.
“People capitalize on this and sometimes you get people parading themselves as even staff of the Commission, which they are not, and they are able to extort money from people. But I think that we have put across interventions such as automating our business process and digitizing the process. to address some of these issues,” he stated in an interview on Accra based Citi TV monitored by myactiveonline.com.
