Surveyors advised to adopt technology for quality service
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Lands and Forestry, Francis Manu Adabor, has advised licensed surveyors in the country to adopt technology and proactive measures to meet the changing phase of cadastral surveying for effective service delivery.
According to the Member of Parliament for Ahafo Ano South East, it was important to embrace the new means of data capture as the changing spheres of life had moved from the conventional methods to a more digitalised format.
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Addressing participants at the fourth Annual General Meeting of the Licensed Surveyors Association of Ghana (LISAG), he explained that the changing phase of cadastral surveying meant the era of compass, which ensured that the right tools and techniques were used to produce accurate and timely plans fit to meet the needs of clients.
Mr Adabor, however, added that as progressive professionals looking forward to building a resilient association, “it was a must that we all embrace ourselves for the task we have at hand in land administration and management”.
The annual meeting, which brought together licensed surveyors and experts in the field of land surveying across the country, was to celebrate the successes of the association while deliberating on strategies that would build and enhance service delivery.
It was dubbed: “The Changing Phase of Cadastral Surveying for Effective Land Management”.
Meeting
At the opening ceremony, the President of LISAG, Samuel Larbi-Darko, underscored the need for the licensed surveyors to be abreast of relevant provisions that impacted their work in the land service value chain.
He stated that it had become increasingly important to do more with technology, which had become a huge part of modern land survey space.
Mr Larbi-Darko, however, urged members to stay up-to-date in terms of continuous education requirements and new, complex technologies in order to compete in the evolving industry.
He urged the association to build the capacity of its members to fit the modern market.
Ethics
The Chief Justice, Justice Kwasi Anin Yeboah, lauded the fact that land documentation and registration had seen a lot of transformation to improve the system and enhance efficiency in land delivery in Ghana.
In a speech read on his behalf by Justice Baffoe Bonnie, a Justice of the Supreme Court, he stated that many quack and suspicious land agents had found crude means of registering their land with plans other than the legally stipulated documents over the years.
This action, Justice Yeboah warned, must not be taken lightly, and urged the surveyors not to append their signatures on any document which did not conform to the standards.
“We have recently jailed a lot of the quack surveyors marauding around and causing problems as qualified surveyors. We shall continue to do our part to ensure we weed out these ‘goro boys’,” he stressed.
Justice Yeboah, however, called on LiSAG to deepen its collaboration with the judiciary through the design of capacity building workshops to train judges on the rudiments of practice and the changing phase as a new way of working with the judiciary to ensure sanity in land registration since the cadastral plan was one of the foremost documents for such transactions.
Embracing technology
The Head of Local Government Service, Dr Ato Arthur, noted that over the past few years, licensed surveyors had embraced technology and a significant digitisation of surveying equipment, workflows and outputs.
These trends, he said, would only continue, and called on licensed surveyors to position themselves for the opportunities that existed in that sector and to also contribute to national development.