Licensed surveyors can help create a digitized land-litigated database – Chief Justice

The Chief Justice, His Lordship Kwasi Anin-Yeboah says licensed surveyors can help create a digitized land-litigated database that would connect judgments from different courts on the same piece of land.

“In these days of your modern types of equipment like drones and LiDAR, we are sure adjudication processes would be more convenient, fast, and easy to interpret with graphics,” he said in his speech read on his behalf by Justice Baffoe-Bonnie, at the 4th Seminar and Annual General Meeting of the Licensed Surveyors Association of Ghana (LiSAG).

The 4th Seminar and Annual General Meeting of the Licensed Surveyors Association of Ghana (LiSAG) was held under the theme “The Changing Phase of Cadastral Surveying for Effective Land Management”.

Additionally, Justice Anin-Yeboah noted that licensed surveyors would be assigned to courts, to assist judges with understanding plans or maps before hearing cases, and to some extent, enable them to conduct an independent survey for contesting parties.

“I know you have begun some engagements and I urge you to design capacity-building workshops to train judges on the rudiments of your practice and the changing phase you so espouse. The changing phase also means a new way of working with the judiciary to ensure sanity in land registration since the cadastral plan is one of the foremost documents to be relied on for the transactions.” 

He noted further that surveyors need to take seriously the renewal of licenses, adding that, the surveyor’s association should institute an Ethics and Disciplinary Committee to sanction members not conforming to professional standards of practice.

“It is a shame to sometimes realize many of our land issues are due to spatial measurements and wrong interpretation by different surveyors picking same land. We have recently jailed a lot of the quack surveyors marauding around and causing problems as qualified surveyors.

It is an undeniable fact that their network and linkages are unbelievable as such LiSAC would have to design a sophisticated regime of instrumentation and identification that breaks their chain of conniving with key actors to have lands registered.”

The AGM was attended by Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie the Supreme Court Judge representing His Lordship Justice Anin Yeboah, the Cheif Justice of the Republic of Ghana, Dr. Ing. Nana Ato Arthur, Head of Local Government Service, and Mr. Francis Manu Adabor, the chairman of Parliamentary Select Committee on Lands and Forestry and others.