Nii Arde Nkpa family embraces government’s land digitization agenda

Having gained legitimacy from an Accra High Court as the allodial owners of the Kokrobite, Langma and Tuba lamds in Ngleshie Amanfro constituency of the Greater Accra Region, the Nii Arde Nkpa family has served notice of their intentions to embark on a land regularizations exercise.

The exercise, according to Daniel Nii Arde Tagoe, the head of the Arde Nkpa Family is to migrate the registration and regularization of land documents from manual to digital.

Nii Arde Tagoe told press men on Thursday, May 14, 2021, that the family has recognized the need for them to synchronize the land registration exercise with the digitization agenda being pursued by the Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.

He assured that the exercise is not targeted at any person or company but part of a bigger operation “Operation Getting Things Done Right” which seeks to bring development and unity to the three aforementioned communities.

“We are going to embark on vigorous regularization of documents – Produce your document. Every developer on our land must take notice of this and when such time reaches, the rule of the game is complied. If you refuse to comply, we will assume that you came to steal our property.

“If you know you have a genuine claim of the land, when the time reaches, produce your document. Our job is verification to know whether you bought it from the right sources. We want to know whether your document is genuine and when it is genuine, it is incumbent on us to protect your land”, he noted.

“The era where the land property is sold to two or three people is over. This is not a witch-hunting exercise or to penalize anybody. It is an exercise meant to create a digitized database. It is proper in the sense that where we have reached as a family, we have to support the government to make the system work better for all of us. So, we are also going to clean the system.

“With a digitized database, the chiefs cannot say that I signed a document without going to the site. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. So, we need to also do things that will protect us. We don’t want to fall victim to the law and go and stand at the law court and pretend as if we don’t know what we have done. The law cannot bail you out. If you don’t have the authority to make sales, don’t make any grants. If you have the authority, don’t make double grants. The law is so clear”.

Reports have been rife in the media space of a certain Frank Lewis who claims to have authorization from the Nii Arde Nkpa Family to trade lands on their behalf.

Daniel Nii Arde Tagoe refuted those reports, urging the public not to deal with the man who he prefers to label as an ‘impostor’.

He cautioned the public to be wary of fraudsters parading as persons with permission by family to sell their properties.

“It is not only Frank Luis that we are hearing, we know about a lot of people who took advantage of our litigation in court to also sold parts of our land. We are not going to bulldoze peoples’ property. We are not going to clear people. You just have to comply and there will be no chaos. When you produce your document, for example, if it is from our predecessors, we just have to endorse it for you.

“But when you come and we realize that you bought the land from a different source other than the right source, then we will tell you our language and if you comply, we move on. If not, you just have to remove your building property and leave our land for us”, he stressed.