Committee for Joint Action (CJA), a pressure group, has called on President J.E.A. Mills to set up an independent commission of enquiry to conduct a public probe into the allocation of state lands and government assets.
It accused the Kufuor Administration of disposing of state property, especially lands in prime areas in Accra, at paltry prices and without recourse to proper procedure.
Mr Kwasi Adu, a leading member of the CJA, who made the call at a press conference in Accra yesterday, said the Chief Justice, Mrs Georgina Wood, “who should know the law, threw away any sense of integrity and decency and went for the land-grab”.
He mentioned some of the persons who acquired the land during the Kufuor Administration as Mrs Georgina Wood, Chief Justice; Mr K.T. Hammond, former Deputy Energy Minister; Ms Irene Addo, MP for Tema West; Hajia Alima Mahama, former Women and Children’s Affairs Minister; Ms Oboshie Sai Cofie, former Minister f Tourism; and Dr Abu Sakara Forster, 2008 CPP Vice Presidential candidate.
He accused the CJ of having no regard for the Code of Ethics of Judges and expressed surprise that the same person who would be appointing judges to sit on cases regarding the land-grab was involved in such deals.
Supporting their statements with documents from the Lands Commission covering how over 180 plots of state land were disposed of without recourse to laid-down procedure, Mr Adu said some of the buyers paid as little as GH¢15,000 for the land in Airport Residential Area.
He explained that the laws of the country stated that lands acquired by the government were supposed to be used only in the public interest or for the purpose for which they were acquired.
He added that the 1992 Constitution also made it clear that if the government was unable to use the lands acquired, it should let the owner of the property have the first option of acquiring it.
Mr Adu explained that in 1998, the then government introduced an urban renewal programme, part of which was to re-develop government residential properties to ensure optimal use of land and the realisation of the full latent values in the land, as well as providing new modern housing stock for the government.
He said the NDC government identified public lands in Cantonments, Airport Residential Area, Kanda, Switchback and Ridge for the re-development and in 2000, the Cabinet approved the Accra Redevelopment Scheme to be carried out under a public-private sector partnership.
This, he said, was a means of funding and executing the projects and the government then introduced a publicly publicised system based on bidding rules and guidelines for the selection of individual applicants and prospective developers.
Mr Adu said under the NDC government’s Redevelopment Policy Phase 1, which was executed before 2000, “the proceeds from the sale of 67 plots of land, sold mostly to companies and few individuals, enabled that government to build 83 replacement bungalows and 169 residential units”.
He noted, however, that the NPP in 2005 executed their own in-filling scheme, such as the open-to-the-public-approval Redevelopment Plan when the Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, together with the Chairman and Executive Secretary of the Lands Commission, allocated 19.54 acres of land to 90 persons.
“Under the NPP scheme, the allocations were so arbitrary and haphazard that even the persons who were allocated the plots did not complete the application for leases for Government Plots (Form 5) as stipulated in LI 230,” he alleged.
He said under the implementation of the Phase two of the programme in 2004, the NPP Administration decided not to pay attention to procedure; as a result, this was suspended several times until 2008, “when the NPP decided to ransack the properties without recourse to proceedings”.
Mr Adu said the NPP sold most of the government lands to NPP members on protocol basis, while others were offered through bidding that was not publicised.
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