<<Print>>

The Association of Property Dealers and Compliance Facilitators (APDCF) has bemoaned the newly introduced Lands Title Registration System initiated by the Land Administration Project (LAP), under the Lands Commission, describing it as a total failure.

The new system, according to the Lands Commission, has been perfectly fashioned and well thought through to make it easier and faster for land owners as well as publishers to register their properties throughout the country.

But the members of the Association, at a press briefing in Accra yesterday disagreed with the purpose of introducing the new system and rather, described it as  “beautiful on paper, but ugly with its implementation.’’

The association members believe the new system has rather rendered the registration of lands more cumbersome, expensive and insecure.

“The association wishes to take this opportunity to bring to the attention of the government and stakeholders that, all that officers from the Lands Commission have been saying in the media, describing the new system as progressing smoothly are lies, calculated at throwing dust into the eyes of the unsuspecting public. The fact on the ground is that the new system is a failure and thus causing us of headache because it is bringing about a huge loss of revenue to the state.

The lands commission has been deceiving the whole country that presently it takes between two to three months to obtain a land certificate and that they are even trying to reduce the time to a month. This is totally false, if one happens to obtain a certificate within a period of one year that would be a miracle with this new system being operated.

The association, in comparing the old system with the new one was far better than this new one which can best be described as a joke’’, they explained.

According to them the implementation of the new system has also caused revenue to decline simultaneously as a result of its additional cost burden imposed on clients; making it unattractive and worth pursuing.

“Formerly the Lands Title Database could lodge between 800- 1000 applications per month, but under the new system, lodgments have declined and as a result has directly affected revenue...they claimed people were mistaken yellow cards for Lands Title Certificates hence another reason for the introduction of the new system but that alone has caused government to lose huge sums of monies; government had already pumped monies into printing yellow cards worth millions of Cedis and just at a go they dump them all in the name of a new system, at least they should have allowed the old system , they have two forty- footer containers full of dumped yellow cards that was printed with the tax payers money, so what would have happened if they had taken their time in order to save government some money?’’, they averred.

They said before the implementation of the new system, the three months ultimatum which was issued to clients in order to wipe out the old system was not just enough but also had no legal backing.

“Because of the lapses in the new system, they have not been able to implement it in Tema. So Tema is still using the old system and people have been going there to apply for land titles instead of coming to Accra because of the porous nature of the new system they have imposed on us here. The new system is not helping at all, something that could have been done easily under the old system now takes about six months to get done, and yet they still go about to lie to the public that with the new system clients can now get their applications sorted within three months. If you go to the Lands Title office anytime all you see is clients in long queues left at the mercy of the hot sun in quest for their land titles, and they say the new system is rather helping?’’, they yelled.

At the press briefing, they  also quizzed why under the land administration project the business processes within the Lands Sector have still not been digitized under the Land Information System; this, they explained would be able to curb the double mapping system that made it possible to generate two land certificates for one land, causing litigations among clients.