By Otchere Darko

I went to my hometown recently, after some years of having been away from that place. I was shocked with what I found. All the previous farmlands that were lying within approximately two miles radius from the outskirts of it had all become part of the town. As a result of that, all the people who previously farmed on these lands have become ‘farmless’ and without any realistic means of livelihood. This development has created mass unemployment and poverty in the town.... a place that previously was a farming area and a breadbasket for the local community in that part of Ghana.

When one casts one’s eyes nationwide, one notices this situation everywhere in the country. One then wonders why we are turning farmlands around towns everywhere in the country into residential areas, without worrying about that. I remember vividly University of Ghana in the late seventies. It was surrounded by grasslands and woodlands all around it....northwards, southwards, eastwards and westwards. Madina was then a small village separated from Legon by a vast stretch of grassland. After Madina and along the Aburi-Accra road, the stretch of grassland continued northwards to Ayimensa, which was then a cottage made up of a couple of huts dotted beneath the Aburi Mountains. This stretch of grassland, which extended as long as the eyes could see on both sides of the Aburi-Accra road from Ayimensa to the Airport area, was a grazing land for several herdsmen who bred mainly the Ada cattle. Three decades later, Legon and all the lands from Ayimensa to the Airport area have “merged” into one residential conurbation, with all the intervening stretches of savannah grassland and the grazing herds of Ada cattle having vanished into oblivion. What goes through the minds of our political leaders and planners who allow this to happen? Will there be any land in Ghana for farming in the next hundred to five hundred years, if the current trend continues? Is this because we think that we do not need to worry today about what will happen hundred years from now, as one high ranking Ghanaian strangely told me one day? It is clear that we are “wasting” land in Ghana today. It is clear that this wastage will adversely affect the future availability of land for agriculture and other uses. We therefore need to worry about this trend. We need to take stock of the way we use land in Ghana now. We need to stop towns and cities from expanding “uncontrolled”, while they swallow up all farmlands around them. Unless we do this, Ghana’s future development and growth will be seriously impeded.

In my opinion, the Government should control the expansion of towns and cities by discouraging and halting private residential land development. Instead, the Government should encourage private professional estate developers to build residential accommodations to let, and to sell. The Government should then encourage Ghanaians to rent or buy the already built houses developed by these professional developers. The Government can do the encouragement and discouragement through its fiscal policies, as well as through direct public education and persuasion. In all modern countries, professional estate developers are the engine of growth of their cities and towns. We need to popularise this idea and its practice in Ghana now. One of the reasons why Ghanaians prefer to build, rather than buy, is because they believe, [and rightly so], that it is cheaper and more qualitative to build one’s own house. To popularise the idea of renting and buying already built houses, it is necessary to change the perception of Ghanaians towards “already built houses” put up by private professional developers. Ghanaians must believe that those houses are cheaper and more qualitative. If Ghanaians believe that it will cost them more to build their own houses, then they will prefer to buy already built houses to building their own, given that quality is the same. Also, if Ghanaians believe that houses built by professional estate developers are more qualitative, they will feel more comfortable to buy those houses and will surely patronise them, provided they are also cheaper and more affordable. The Government should therefore use fiscal and other policies to incentivise and assist private professional estate developers to build cheaper and qualitative houses that will appeal to Ghanaians and turn them away from building their own houses and wasting land.

If house building in Ghana becomes more professionalised, the kind of land wasting that is going on will end; or at least it will reduce. This is because we will be able to use less land for residential buildings than we are using now, by making a more intensive use of land laterally and vertically. *We will do this firstly by building more houses on the same stretches of land, through the attachment of one to another as “terraced houses”, just as it is done in many modern cities, especially in countries where land is very scarce. Building terraced houses is one best way of using land economically and wisely. Terraced houses, which in the past used to be common in many places in Ghana, even before independence, used to be owned by close family members. Today, they will only be possible to build in this country if we have a system which allows professional estate developers to build houses for letting and selling, while the rest of the population rent or buy them. *A second way of making more effective use of land is to use the vast “space above” to expand the areas available for building. If houses in Ghana were predominantly built by professional estate developers, building vertically would be feasible and very popular. Currently, more than 90% of residential houses in Ghana are single-storey buildings. We need to build houses that are made up of two or more storeys, to make better use of the vast space above, which is currently wasted through the building of such single-storey houses. This is where multi-storey blocks of flats become an essential means of making an effective use of vertical space. The Government should therefore encourage professional estate developers to build more of such multiple storey blocks of flats, which they can then let out, or sell as “separate flats” located at different floor levels in such blocks, just as it is done in many cities and towns in several developed, and developing countries.

Source: Otchere Darko; [This writer is a centrist, semi-liberalist, pragmatist, and an advocate for “inter-ethnic cooperation and unity”. He is an anti-corruption campaigner and a community-based development protagonist. He opposes the negative, corrupt, and domineering politics of NDC and NPP and actively campaigns for the development and strengthening of “third parties”. He is against “a two-party only” system of democracy {in Ghana}....... which, in practice, is what we have today.]