President John Mahama has tasked the Ministry of Interior, Local Government and Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources “to develop guidelines to regulate demolitions that are in conformity with the laws and statutes.”
This, the President noted will protect the rights of citizens while guaranteeing that heads of public institutions are held “culpable for their inactions.”
Addressing Parliament in his State of the Nation Address on Tuesday, President Mahama recognized that due to the increasing urbanization in Ghana, “indiscipline and lawlessness are fast becoming a part of our institutional fabric.”
Since the beginning of this year, a number of demolitions have been carried out by state institutions and individuals in some suburbs of Accra and Kumasi.
People who have been displaced by the numerous demolitions have lost their homes, belongings, shops, sheds, and wares amounting to millions of Ghana cedis.
Some also lost their lives as a result of a struggle between them and the security operatives who accompanied and supervised the exercises.
The President has since attributed the spate of drastic demolition exercises in the country to the failure of heads of public institutions in preventing encroachment on state lands.
According to him, these institutions are expected to act “in a timely manner in protecting state-owned lands” because “it doesn’t help to go to sleep on ones right only to suddenly awake one day and seek to enforce those rights by measures as drastic as demolition.”
He revealed that public institutions will therefore be strengthened to make them transparent and public friendly.
Click on link below to listen to the President
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana