Land Registration in Ghana: Past, Present and the Future

Abstract

The establishment in the Gold Coast of commercial agriculture based on a permanent cultivation of the soil, the development of the mining and timber industries in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the concession boom that these events carried in their train, created favourable conditions for capitalist development for which the private ownership of the means of production is a prerequisite. However, at that time the basic means of production in the Gold Coast, i.e. the land, was generally held in common and was not privately owned.Colonialism, however, had the effect of establishing two systems of production in the country. The capitalist sector which became dominant was created at commercial and urban centres. The traditional communal system based on what, for want of a better term, one could call subsistence agriculture, remained at the periphery in the countryside. The dominant capitalist sector produced in its own image a class of property owners consisting of European, national and rural capitalists. Attempts by the latter to acquire lands to be privately owned gave rise to problems of insecurity of title. A machinery for land registration was thought to be the most adequate means of solving the problem.