Government is taking steps to retrieve all lands belonging to major health facilities which have been encroached upon.

That is the assurance of Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, Health Minister-designate.

Answering a question on the specific case of how lands belonging to the Pantang Hospital in Accra have been encroached upon, and what his ministry is doing with regards the situation, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu said that he has been working to get the situation resolved.

“I am very much aware of the encroachment at Pantang and we started building some fence walls in some critical areas when we started rehabilitating the Ghana Health Service training facility and turning it into a treatment center which is not being completed. We have already ordered for some fencing to be done but not the entire area.

“At one stage, I asked one of my deputy ministers to go and contact the chief executive of the La Nkwantanang District Assembly to stop issuing permits to those who are building in that area.

“My investigations indicated that the frontage of the facility was like someone’s land and I said that it can never be true. Kwame Nkrumah (the former president) will not establish a place like this and leave a land in front of it and say that it someone’s land so let us go to the Roads Ministry and find out the original site plan of the Pantang Hospital to see if this part is not a road," he said.

He added that he plans to set up a small committee to look into the matter and ensure that for other health facilities around the country, they also receive the same attention because it poses a threat to expansion works for these facilities.

“So what we are trying to do now is to do compulsory purchase and we’re engaging with finance to give us money to send land evaluators to do some evaluation. At one stage, we were thinking of sending in the police but I said that we shouldn’t do that because we don’t have the law backing that

“So, that has become a serious albatross on me and I plan to set up a small committee in the ministry to look at not only Pantang, Tema, Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, the Mental Hospital even in Cape Coast, their lands have been encroached. We have to find a way to protect these lands. I believe that will not only be the problem of the Health Minister but all of us as Members of Parliament and the Ghanaian citizenry alike, to protect what lands we have. The irony again, is the fact that there are some facilities that even when they want to expand, there is no land for us to expand," he added.