President John Dramani Mahama has announced government’s plans to lay before Parliament the Divestiture of Public Property Bill.
The object of the Bill is to legally govern the sale, transfer, or privatization of state-owned assets in order to improve economic efficiency.
He reiterated that if one wants to sell public property such as landed property, one would need the approval of the representatives of the people, which is Parliament.
“And so any public land processing will not be processed at the land commission unless it is ratified in Parliament,” President Mahama stated on Wednesday evening during his engagement with the Diaspora Community of Ghanaians Living in Lusaka, Zambia.
“This will stop the rampant sale of government assets.”
The President’s engagement with the Ghanaian community in Zambia forms part of his three-day state visit to the Southern African nation at the invitation of his Zambian counterpart, President Hakainde Hichilema.
President Mahama said on Wednesday that the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) was working again, stating that under the previous Government there was an attempt to hand over TOR to somebody for 15 years.
“And I mean, really, what say do the people have? So one government can come and just mortgage, public property without the say of the people’s representatives.”
President Mahama said 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 sell off a government factory, one would have to go to the representatives of the people.
“And if they (Parliament) think that it is fair, they will approve it. If they think it’s not fair, they don’t approve of it,” he said.
“And if they don’t approve of it, then it can’t happen. And so I’ve asked the Attorney General to work on something.”
Touching on land registration, President Mahama noted that the government was introducing Blockchain Technology to ensure that they digitize the records of the Land Registry.
He said one major issue with land administration was the registering of title deeds and processing of land documents, which they were dealing with as a government.
He said, however, there was also the other side, where land belonging to families and chiefs were double sold to people.
“And a lot of times, people who go to buy lands don’t even go back to the Lands Commission to make a search to find out whether the person selling the land to them is the real owner or not,” President Mahama said.
“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 digitization of the land registration would go a long way to help resolve the issue of multiple sales of land.
“Once we’ve digitized the records, you go to the lands registry. They will look at it. They will have the record of the land from where it has passed to who and who owns it currently. And then when you’re dealing with that person, you know that legally you are dealing with the right person. With regards to public lands, they set up a committee that presented its report.”
He noted that they had canceled several leases that had not been processed yet, saying “these were public lands that were just distributed and looted”.
He said people just carved up and bought for cheap government land at GH¢150,000 and turned around to sell that same plot of land for $2 million, which were lands in prime areas of Accra.
“And yet, if you look at the value that they are giving and how much people buy them for and turn around and resell them, it just doesn’t make sense at all. And so we’ve got a Committee. They’ve mapped out not only in Accra, all the regions what the status of public lands are.”
The President said in some places, people had finished building 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. And 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 in Airport Residential or somewhere like that.
“But those that were in the process of being done at the time that we came, we have halted that process and we’re taking those lands back. But when we take those lands back, it means that we must find a proper way of making sure that another group won’t come and start selling them again.”