Land guards’ activities are increasingly posing a risk to private developers in urban areas and making it difficult for people to develop their land. Finding a lasting solution to this threat is necessary.

A group of people known as land guards attack and vandalise real estate developers and their projects.

Even though the majority of these private developers have legitimately acquired their land, these land guards intimidate, harass, threaten with all manner of weapons, and even beat their victims.

Due to the land guards’ avarice, some victims have even sustained cutlass wounds. While some land guards go around collecting digging fees and preventing labourers from working, others resort to using force to extort large sums of money from property owners.

People’s attempts to acquire and develop their parcels of land, especially those living in expanding urban communities, have become so frustrating, and the actions of these land guards have dashed the hopes of many.

The fact that people who legitimately acquired plots of land with the necessary documentation have had to abandon their projects out of fear of being killed by these land guards, as it has happened to some in the past, is extremely disturbing.

The initial purpose of the introduction of land guards was to safeguard the legitimate owners of lands, whether they be family, individual, or stool lands, from encroachments. However, some people have abused the situation to take advantage of helpless people and engage in multiple land sales.

Their actions are now more of an annoyance than a deterrent to encroachment. Some private developers, however, have turned to the courts to handle their cases to prevent them from losing their hard-earned investment.

The harassment of residents of the Amamole community in the Ga North District by land guards is a prime example of this. Residents were terrorised in the community and were forced to cry for protection and appeal to the Police and social intervention groups to help them.

Residents claim that these land guards forcibly took from them pieces of land they had purchased for more than 12 to 50 years with proper documentation, demolishing some buildings in the process.

The Spectator is worried that despite government measures to ward off land guards, they are still able to pursue their agenda. To avoid land disputes, individuals must search at the Lands Department before doing business on lands.

Also, those who parade themselves as land owners but in actual fact are crooks selling the same land in multiples should be reported to the appropriate authorities for the law to deal with them.

Let us make a concerted effort to ward off these land guards to enable individuals acquire parcels of land genuinely and be free to develop them so they can have a decent place to lay their heads.

We hope that the activities of land guards will sooner or later become a thing of the past.