Months of searching for land across Haatso, Agbogba, Abokobi, Frafraha and Oyarifa left accountant, career coach and SME development specialist Dickson Assan frustrated, not only by soaring prices, but by what he sees as deeper structural and policy weaknesses in Ghana’s land administration system.
His experience has prompted a nine-point reform agenda aimed at making land ownership more transparent, secure and development-oriented.
Dickson Assan is calling on the policymakers and the state authorities to consider the following recommendations to reform the land sector and make it fit for the purposes of development and housing.
1. Create a database of actual land transaction prices
Ghana needs a reliable database showing what land actually sells for, rather than relying largely on advertised asking prices. This would give buyers, sellers, valuers and developers credible evidence for determining market values.
2. Accelerate land digitisation
Digitising land records should make it easier to establish ownership, verify documents and process transactions. Greater certainty of title would reduce the uncertainty and delays that make land transactions unnecessarily difficult.
3. Make multiple sales harder
A stronger, integrated land-record system should prevent the same parcel from being sold to multiple people. Buyers should not have to discover after paying for land that someone else has already purchased it.
4. Strengthen enforcement against encroachment
Landowners should not have to constantly defend legally acquired property against encroachers. Stronger enforcement would provide greater confidence that registered ownership actually means something on the ground.
5. Crack down on land guards
Assan argues that people are increasingly forced to spend money on walls, caretakers and other forms of private protection because of land-guard activities. Effective enforcement would remove this artificial cost of land ownership.
6. Regularly value urban land
Land values should be assessed systematically using transparent market information and comparable transactions. This could reduce arbitrary pricing and give the market a more credible reference point.
7. Consider stronger taxation of idle serviced land
Dickson Assan proposes serious consideration of higher taxes on valuable serviced land deliberately left undeveloped for extended periods. The idea is to discourage speculative hoarding and encourage landowners to put scarce urban land into productive use.
8. Introduce land-value capture
When taxpayers finance a road, electricity network or other infrastructure that substantially increases surrounding land values, Assan believes part of that unearned increase in value should help finance further public infrastructure.
He believes that if public investment makes private land dramatically more valuable, society should capture some of that additional value.
9. Release properly planned and serviced land
Ghana also needs more residential land that is properly planned and supported by roads, drainage, electricity and other basic infrastructure. This would expand the supply of buildable land and reduce pressure on already expensive urban plots.
Taken together, the proposals seek to change the way Ghana thinks about land.
He was quick to clarify that the objective is not for government to arbitrarily dictate what someone’s private property should cost. Rather, it is to create a transparent, secure and functional land market where prices are informed by real transactions, ownership is protected and scarce land is encouraged toward productive use.
For Assan, his frustrating search for a family plot exposed a national problem. If land remains difficult to price, difficult to secure and easy to hoard, the consequences will ultimately be felt not only by land buyers but by homeowners, tenants, businesses and the wider economy.
