Ghanaians will no longer be able to purchase, register or transfer ownership of land without the use of the Ghana Card.
This is according to the National Identification Authority (NIA), the sole statutory body mandated to issue national ID cards to the Ghanaian citizenry – both resident and non-resident as well as legally and permanently resident foreign nationals – and manage the National Identification System (NIS).
“There are 17 things you cannot do without a Ghana Card, for instance, one cannot apply for and be issued with a passport, drivers’ license, insurance policies, engage in banking transactions, cannot purchase, register or transfer a land to another among others,” stated a representative of the NIA at a press briefing held under the auspices of the Information Ministry.
With the use of the Ghana Card as a pre-requisite for the purchase and registration of land, the many challenges fraught with the sale and purchase of lands in the country is expected to be properly tackled and ultimately resolved.
Land acquisition in the country is beset with a lot of constraints. These include insecurity of tenure, inadequate land policy and indiscipline in the land market, leading to fraud, conflicts, frustration and anxiety.
Although there are large tracts of land in the country, there are also many related problems with acquiring the right to land.
The blame, for all the inherent challenges, can be mostly laid squarely on the doorstep of the structure of the legal framework for land administration.
Currently, 166 state laws that regulate land administration and establish 13 different mandates for different agencies exist in the statute books.
There are many pieces of legislation and judicial decisions on land which have a significant impact on the constitutional, statutory, common and customary laws on land.
Read This: Ghana: GT Bank, UBA IDRs revised to ‘B-‘ by Fitch
While a number of these laws and decisions clarify the various legal rules, others confound them.
According to the Authority, the National Information System (NIS) and the Ghana card are interconnected processes and the system provides a secure biometric register with a verification system.
The NIS, the Authority further asserts, can track and trace all transactions and return accurate and up-to-date information on each individual and provides a single source of truth for verification of persons.
At the moment, some 15 million Ghanaians have been registered by the NIA with some 13 million cards issued by the Authority.
The National Identification Authority (NIA) was set up in 2003 under the Office of the President with the mandate to issue national ID cards and manage the National Identification System (NIS).
This resulted in the passing of the NIA Act, 2006 (Act 707) to give it the necessary legal premises on which to operate.
The National Identity Register Act, 2008 (Act 750) was also passed to give authorisation for collection of personal and biometric data and to ensure the protection of privacy and personal information of enrollees.
The full mandate of the NIA included the establishment of a national data centre so as to manage a national database, as well as to set up a system to collect, process, store, retrieve and disseminate personal data on the population (Ghanaian citizens – both resident and non-resident, and legally and permanently resident foreign nationals), ensure the accuracy, integrity and security of such data, and to issue and promote the use of national identity cards in Ghana.
