A former aide to former President J.J. Rawlings has appealed for restraint in handling the emotive issue of land acquisition during former President John Agyekum Kufuor's administration. Nana Opoku Acheampong told the Daily Graphic in Accra that while the land acquisition ought to be investigated and any malfeasance appropriately punished, "the same reports also speak of cases where individuals responded to advertisements in the national newspapers inviting bids for these lands". Sharing his perspective on the issue, he said applicants in those cases subsequently attended interviews before the successful ones were awarded the land on payment of very substantial amounts of money. Therefore, Nana Acheampong who is now a business executive, said it was important "to separate these cases so that the impression is not created that anyone who obtained an allocation under the scheme during the administration of President Kufuor was a criminal". "My fellow National Democratic Congress (NDC) members must be careful not to use one single brush to smear the good along with the bad, and seek to embarrass highly placed persons perceived to be our political opponents using the reported malfeasance which may or may not have taken place in the allocation processes under the administration of President Kufuor. This is not worthy of 2010 Ghana," he stated. The issue of government lands acquired by officials of previous government became topical recently when it emerged that the former International Students Hostel at the Airport City, which was initially allocated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was re-zoned for residential development by the government in 2007, and sold to 36 selected buyers for GH¢2O,OOO or GH¢15,000 per plot. The 36 beneficiaries include high ranking politicians, corporate executives and members of Parliament, the judiciary and the Police Service. The 25-acre and has since been re-acquired by the Lands Commission and allocated to three state institutions. The Lands Commission said with the powers conferred on it by law, it had withdrawn the sale offer, following a re-zoning of the area by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to its original civil status, and appropriated it among the three state institutions, namely the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ghana Revenue Authority and the Public Procurement Authority for the construction of new offices. Nana Acheampong, who together with Mrs Valerie Sackey ran the Castle Information Bureau and subsequently the Public Affairs Secretariat during the PNDC and NDC administrations between 1983 and 2000, said he was instrumental in setting up several committees of inquiries to go into passionate allegations by Workers Defence Committees (WDCs) and Peoples Defence Committees (PDCs) against management and community leaders leading to confiscation of assets and dismissals from office of people targeted as culprits of those allegations. He said his knowledge and experiences from those investigations and the propensity in a climate of hysteria to do injustice had compelled him to make the appeal to those who now appeared eager to tread that path. Nana Acheampong said he had heard many reports of malfeasance in the acquisition of land from undoubtedly credible sources, including a case where public land in a prime area in Kumasi sold to an individual for GH¢1,000 was reportedly resold by the said individual for GH¢900,000 within a matter of days. Source: Daily Graphic