Some real estate developers seeking the services of the Lands Commission in Accra have been disappointed following a suspension of activities of the commission.
According to them, they have not been able to undertake land registration and other relevant services with the commission for the past 8 months.
Speaking to Citi News, one of the aggrieved real estate developers, Rodney Squire of Rodget Consortium expressed his frustration on behalf of peers.
“I submitted a document at the commission somewhere in November. As I speak to you now, the search is still not out and when you go they keep telling you that it is in the system, and it is indeed impeding the progress of our business. If somebody wants to buy your land and the person is willing to pay but because the search result is not out for confirmation, the payment won’t be made, and it is a serious problem to some of us.”
“Most of my colleagues are also complaining about the same thing, and it has affected me badly. As I speak to you, I have about three transactions that are hanging all because search results are not out. This is the job that I do to feed my family and to take care of myself and to run my company, so how do I pay my workers? How do I take care of my family? How do I live and survive?” he quizzed.
Lands Commission to move more services online after a successful pilot
The Lands Commission began moving its manual system unto an online platform from Monday, November 9, 2020, to render a more efficient service to the general public.
The online platform dubbed the Ghana Enterprise Land Information System was in line with government’s aim of digitalizing every aspect of the economy.
The Lands Commission in January 2020 promised to move more of its services online following the success of its piloted online platform.
Speaking to Citi News, Director of the Land Valuation Division of the commission, Surveyor Benjamin Arthur said some challenges they faced at the beginning of the rollout have been solved.
“We intended to roll out the online services for a number of our functions, but we had a lot of the in-house cleaning of our data to do so we had to start with our services searches and when we did the initial rollout we encountered some backend challenges. It took a while to resolve the issues, but they have been resolved now”.
He added that his outfit has begun working with its internal records to begin moving some other services including registration of lands and stamping onto the platform by February 2021.
“While we were trying to digitize our records, we were picking, service by service, what was possible to move online depending on the kind of service. So we started with our searches as a service. So, as of now, that is what is online, but we have worked with our internal records and internal processes to the extent that we are now ready to roll out more on our services online”, he added.