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The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Lands and Forestry, Francis Manu-Adabor, has charged surveyors in the country to jealously protect their profession by acting professionally and not to allow quacks to take over their jobs.
He said for the Lands Commission to succeed in its quest to make land registration easier and simple would greatly depend on surveyors as the process “begins and ends with them.”
Accordingly, he charged his colleagues surveyors to add value to their works by upgrading themselves and to ensure that they distinguished themselves from the quacks in the system.
Mr Manu-Adabor made the call yesterday during the opening ceremony of the annual National Retreat for the Survey and Mapping Division (SMD) of the Lands Commission at Ejisu in the Ashanti Region.
It was on the theme: “Repositioning Surveying and Mapping in the Era of Digitalisation for the Socio-Economic Department.”
The retreat was to assess the performance of the division and to find ways to improve its service delivery and reshape the mind-set of the staff to improve efficiency and productivity.
He said with the advent of technology, there would be the need for the professionals to upgrade their knowledge and add value to themselves and ensure they remained relevant in the industry.
The Director of the SMD, Naa Abubakari Abdulai also stressed the importance of using professionally trained surveyors in acquiring land to avoid any litigation.
He said most of the land disputes in the various courts in the country were as a result of people using unqualified surveyors who had no idea about the actual locations of lands.
He advised people desiring to acquire and register lands to “first and foremost approach Survey and Mapping Division of the Lands Commission or a licensed surveyor who would lead you through the process of getting the accurate site plan would have no problems at all.”
Naa Abdulai said the whole world was going digital and the division would not like to be left behind and, as such, had also embraced the process.
“We are thinking of how we can also enhance all that we are doing such that we can get results within a limited time frame,” he said.
According to him, elsewhere, it was possible for surveyors to send information from the fields to the office and “before the surveyor returns to the office the plan would have been already prepared.
He said the division was looking to achieve that “but we need to be resourced: human resource, technical resource and a whole lot.
“Surveying is not a cheap business, surveying is a heavy spender.
And this time around we even need drones and phones with the necessary apps to help you work efficiently,” he said.
“So the digitalisation agenda vis-a-vis our socio-economic development is to tell everybody that, yes we can but we must be resourced in a meaningful way to be able to deliver what we have to,” he pleaded.
The retreat, which ends on May 12, 2023, is being attended by participants from all the regions in the country.
