GOVERNMENT URGED TO ESTABLISH OVERSIGHT BODY (PAGE 29)

THE Ghana Institute of Architects (GIA) has suggested to the government to establish an oversight body to strictly monitor the construction of private development projects in the country.
This, according to the GIA, will ensure that private land developers adhere to the rules governing the development of projects in the country by acquiring the requisite documents and specifications of the projects they intend to develop.
The GIA made the suggestion at a stakeholders meeting in Kumasi on Thursday.
The meeting, which was attended by 25 participants drawn from a cross-section of the public, was on the theme: “Addressing the adverse impact of the non- enforcement of development controls”.
The participants were made up of architects, Lands Commission officers, environmental officers, Fire Service personnel and officials from the Town and Country Planning Department and metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies.
The meeting was a follow-up to an earlier one held in Accra, following a draft report on a research submitted by the GIA, which dealt with the adverse impact of the non-enforcement of building and development controls in Ghana.
The draft report recommended, among others, the constitution of a strong task force to monitor the development of private projects in the country in order to reduce indiscriminate encroachment of public lands, as well as the haphazard construction of houses in the country.
The report also recommended that chiefs who sold land without title to private land developers should be made to face the full rigours of the law.
It said it was important for chiefs and other stakeholders to be provided with skills that would enable them to become conscious of how to use their positions to protect the environment instead of collaborating with private land developers to destroy the environment.
It further suggested that all planning institutions should be sited close to each other to facilitate the processing of building permits, stressing that the present approval procedure on building permits should be reviewed because it was too cumbersome.