Africa-Press – Ghana. President John Dramani Mahama has announced plans by the Government to lay before Parliament, the Divestiture of Public Property Bill.
The objective of the Bill is to legally govern the sale, transfer, or privatisation of state-owned assets to improve economic efficiency.
The President made this known during a Diaspora engagement with the Ghanaian Community living in Lusaka, Zambia.
The Engagement was part of President Mahama’s three-day official visit to Zambia at the invitation of President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia.
President Mahama, said if those in authority wanted to sell public property such as landed property, they would need the approval of the representatives of the people (Parliament).
He explained that when approved by Parliament, it would prevent any public land processing at the Land Commission unless it had been ratified in Parliament, saying “This will stop the rampant sale of government assets.”
President Mahama indicated the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) was working again; declaring that under the previous Government there was an attempt to hand over the refinery to somebody for 15 years.
He explained that if Parliament passed the Public Property Divestiture Bill, which seeks to protect public property such as lands and factories, before one could want to auction a landed public property or sell off public land or a government factory, they had to seek approval from the Legislature.
He also said he had asked the Attorney General to work on refining the Bill to be laid before Parliament.
Touching on land registration, President Mahama said the Government was introducing Blockchain Technology, to ensure that they digitise the records of the Land Registry.
President Mahama, said a major issue with land administration had been the registering of title deeds and processing of land documents, which the government was presently dealing with.
However, there was also another side, where the same plots of land belonging to families and chiefs were indiscriminately sold to different people, leading to chaos and countless disputes.
He noted that in most instances prospective land buyers failed to do the proper required searches at the Lands Commission to ensure that the person selling the land to them was the real owner or not.
“And so, they pay the money to somebody, and then the real owner pops up and says, but that land doesn’t belong to this person,” he said.
President Mahama said digitisation of the land registration system in Ghana, would go a long way to help resolve the issue of multiple sales of such properties.
“Once we’ve digitised the records, you go to the lands registry, they can easily trace the record of the land from where it has passed to who owns it currently, and then when you’re dealing with that person, you know that legally you are dealing with the right person,” he said.
The President indicated that a committee had been set up to map up all public lands across all the regions to know their present status and present its report, adding that by this, they had canceled several leases that had not been processed yet, because these were public lands that were just distributed and looted.
President Mahama noted that in the past people just carved up and cheaply bought government lands at GH¢150,000 and turned around to sell that same plot of land for $2 million, which were properties in prime areas of Accra.
The President said in some places, people had finished building on such public lands and were even living in their houses.
“It would be difficult to say, look, we’re going to break this house and take the land back, so in those cases where they have processed the title, then what we’re doing is we’re asking them to pay the true value of the land,” he said.
President Mahama reiterated that land could not have been sold at GH¢140,000 at the Airport Residential area or at other prime areas, “But those that were in the process of being done at the time that we came, we have halted these processes and we are taking those lands back.”
The President stressed that after retrieving those lands back, the government must ensure that these state properties were firmly secured to prevent another group from coming into power to reverse all that had been achieved.
