A community forum was on Monday held at Banana-Inn, an Accra suburb, to sensitize and inform residents of the Land Administration Project (LAP) under the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources. The LAP is a systematic land title registration exercise that would enable land owners to register their lands in a simple, fast and cheap manner. Mrs. Rebecca Sittie, Acting Director, Land Registry Division of the Lands Commission, explained that the pilot exercise was to be carried out at selected areas. She mentioned the Cantonment, Osu, Kaneshie, and Dansoman areas in Greater Accra Region as well as in Nhyiaso, Patase, North and South Suntreso residential areas in Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region. Mrs Sittie said under the project, teams of field workers, made up of private consultants, would systematically go to property owners and collect information for the exercise. She said the exercise, which would involve measuring of lands and collection of photocopies of all available documents covering land or property. Mrs Sittie said that at the end of registration, that would last three months, the property owners would be asked to pay a fee of 50 Ghana cedis. They would be issued with a title certificate to indicate the owner's rights to the land as guaranteed by the state and free from all other claimants. Mrs Sittie indicated that each team had been given six months to carry out the project and asked residents to support the exercise "to have full rights of their lands and property". Mr. Henry Ford Kamel, Deputy Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, said the project was laudable because it would reduce the turn around time of registration from three years to three months. He said LAP was another attempt by government to bring title registration closer to the people. Mr. Kamel explained that the initiative would help reduce cumbersome procedure under the current sporadic system, which required applicants to visit various land sector agencies to process their documents. He said if bottlenecks associated with land administration were not removed, land issues would continue to undermine national development. Mr. Kamel said "It is the collective responsibility of both government and the entire Ghanaian population to join hands to address land issues". He appealed to all residents, particularly land owners to cooperate with the consultants to enable them to help to achieve the objectives of LAP. Some of the residents told GNA that they were happy that land registration would be brought to their door steps and they would take advantage of the project and register their lands, some of which were acquired by their forefathers. Source: GNA