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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
THE LAND QUESTION: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LAND BANKING IN GHANA
Author(s)
Collins Adu-Bempah Brobbey
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DOI:10.17265/1548-6605/2017.07.004
Affiliation(s)
ABSTRACT
“The
Land question” is an interrogation of the politics of land administration and
its associated conflictsissues in the process of appropriating land in
sub-Saharan Africa in general and Ghana in particular. The central argument of
this paper is that in pre-colonial times, land was not considered a commodity
because it did not have an exchangeable value, in other words, it was neither
owned by individuals nor meant for sale, instead, it was communally owned and
the king or the chief remains the only custodian of the land. However, when
colonial administration took control over Africa, two things happened.
Communally owned land process became formalized and consequently gave impetus
to administrative land (State lands) and traditional land (Stool lands, also
known as Land Tenure System (LTS). And subsequently, land was commoditized or,
for wants of a better word, land became a saleable commodity. Consequently,
communally owned land otherwise refers to in this paper as Traditional Land
Bank and Banking for the indigenous was, however, replaced by what this paper
refers to as “State-cum- Traditional-cum- Individuals Share equity”. And
surprisingly, land appropriation matters and its accompanied escalating
conflicts bizarre had come to occupy center stage of land administration and
appropriations discourses during and in post-colonial eras. Using peer reviewed
articles, newspapers together with purposive in-depth interviews with
stakeholders, traditional chiefs, land administrators, and individual land
owners, this paper investigate the effectiveness of land administration and
appropriation policy in Ghana. Findings revealed inconsistencies as a serious
weakness of the existing land policy in Ghana and concludes that the emergence
of commodification of land and its accompanied land appropriations turns to
pose ominous challenge in the political economy of land acquisition and
entitlement in the entire sub-Saharan Region of which Ghana is no exception. It
recommends establishment of Land Banking system and to create land banks for
easy and peaceful access to land ownership and usage. Also to serve as a recipe
for land administrative and appropriating conflicts.
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