Institutions, Politics And Land Administration In The Ga State In Ghana

ABSTRACT Decades of rapidly growing urban population, the growth of a business and middle class with money to invest, and an expanding private sector with large investment capital and the ability and willingness to pay high prices for property have resulted in rapid commoditisation of land in the Ga State. Concomitant with these are highly insecure land ownership, land litigation and conflict, poor land use planning and enforcement of land laws. Investigating the processes by which communal and statutory lands become difficult to access and tenure insecurity are necessary to determine the potential outcomes of contemporary and future land administration reforms. Specifically, the study investigates the politics of property rights institutions creation and change from 1876 to 2010 in the Ga State in Ghana. The study‟s methodology was philosophically grounded within the pragmatism paradigm which used a convergent parallel mixed methods research approach. Qualitative and quantitative data collection was concurrently done. Selection criteria for in-depth interviews (30) and FGDs (8) of chiefs, family heads and bureaucrats (30 in all) were based on purposive sampling and „snowballing‟ technique. Quantitative data collection involved a household survey of 323 households in 52 localities in 4 purposively selected traditional areas namely Nungua, Tema, Kpone and Gbawe in the Ga State. Archival data from PRAAD, Ghana Law Finder Database and Government of Ghana reports complemented primary data. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) a multi-tier conceptual framework was used to do a systematic analysis of evolving power relations in decision making concerning land administration between the Ghanaian State and the Ga State actors from 1870s to 2010.

Generally, results indicate that in a path-dependent manner, all governments (colonial and post-colonial) used state hegemony to impose land rules on Ga land owners and society. A

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general lack of cooperation and inadequate information characterized the relationships between governments‟ actors and the Ga chiefs and people. Such interactions and high levels of distrust among Ga chiefs, family land owners and individuals resulted in declining trusteeship ideals of Ga land tenure. Speculation in land, wanton land sales, land conflicts and chieftaincy disputes, landlessness, demolition of property and loss of life due to land litigation therefore remain still prevalent in the Ga State. Hence, despite comprehensive interventions such as LAP I, access to land and tenure security remains an acute challenge within the Ga State as some communities and social classes face dire situations of land tenure insecurity. LAP I was poorly conceived and implemented. Set targets for LAP I were hardly achieved- high transaction cost in resource allocation, customary boundary demarcation fiasco and only 8000 out of 50,000 land title certificates were issued in Accra and Kumasi. Self-interested politicians and bureaucrats maximized LAP I budgets and protected their parochial interests for top positions in the new Lands Commission. With regards to customary land administration, empirical evidence suggest that with the exception of Gbawe which has invested in establishing a functional, accountable and self-sustaining customary land secretariat, chiefs and family landowners in Tema, Nungua and Kpone lacked the capacity to manage land well. One key implication of these findings suggests the need for property rights institutions in Ghana to be more inclusive rather than extractive. Inclusive institutions allow different people with different objectives to collectively decide and enforce sanctions on land administration. The study recommends among others more research on Ga land tenure for adaptation into national land policies and the active involvement of Ga chiefs, wulomei, family heads and people in both statutory and customary land administration.