Editorial Monday, October 31, 2022
The Head of Local Government Service Dr. Ing. Nana Ato Arthur has disclosed that the Lands Commission Act 2008, Act 767 revealed that many of our Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) do not have base maps or land use plans which are the objects for development. And many of the areas do not have carved-out roads and some amenities plans.
To him, many of the plans used at the local level lack the topographic details that can help define terrain modeling. It is therefore not strange to see many districts flooding in recent times that used not to be the case.
“We need professionals to work and interpret on the ground these schemes for effective implementation. Since 2003, the formalization of property rights through titling became an integral component of decentralized land administration efforts in Ghana,” he has stated.
Dr. Ato Arthur further said that the creation of new forms of local government structures and the related changes would be a key deliverable in improving efficiency in the land management value change.
“My outfit would collaborate with LiSAG to work on structures that would enable the presence of Licensed Surveyors in every District in Ghana. This would be a key step at ensuring the layouts and planning schemes are done by the requisite professionals. Decentralization in land administration and management is conceptually linked to participatory planning and is thus relevant for land-use planning and cadastral survey, which in turn influence land regularization and formalization,” he stated.
Dr. Ato Arthur said this at a recent seminal by licensed surveyors association of Ghana.
The Daily Searchlight is of the belief that the lack of adequate maps with the necessary features, is a major developmental lapse that should not have been the case in a modern country like Ghana.
Indeed, one wonders how those charged with necessary duties such as security and planning are able to do their work in the absence of proper maps.
We believe that this may be a fundamental cause of the haphazard development we have seen as a nation over the years, particularly in urban areas.
Indeed, we cannot begin to talk of any type of proper infrastructural development without addressing the issue of mapping.
We call on the Ministry of Lands to make a study into this matter and establish what can be done to address this lapse, since it really does not speak well of Ghana as a nation.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Monday, October 31, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com)
