CLIENT SERVICE CENTRE FOR WA LANDS COMMISSION (PAGE 22, OCT 15, 2010)

THE new Lands Commission in Wa in the Upper West Region has set up a client service centre to help streamline the activities of the secretariat.
The acting Regional Lands Officer, Mr David Mwinfor Deribaa, who made this known to the Daily Graphic in Wa, said the measures were aimed at warding off all quack land officers who invaded the premises of the secretariat and claimed to be offering services on behalf of the office.
He said with the new service centre in place, all visitors who needed the services of the office must pass through the client service centre before any service would be rendered to them.
“The purpose of these measures is to streamline and ensure a transparent, sustainable, efficient, cost effective and timely delivery of our services to the public,” he stated.
According to Mr Deribaa, the measures were to ensure the production of reliable, credible and secured tenures for land title holdings.
“From October 1, 2010, any person who obtains our services without passing through the customer service centre will be to his/her own disadvantage,” he warned.
Mr Deribaa mentioned some of the services of the secretariat as site plans for the preparation of leases, investigations into the genuineness of lands purchased, stamping of documents for stamp duty payments which included tax clearance certificates and deeds registration.
He said the situation where clients sought the services of people from the veranda of the secretariat to offer those services would be a thing of the past.
Mr Deribaa said some of those practices led to situations where many people fell prey to the activities of some staff of the commission who collected money from them without doing any work.
He added that apart from taking money from unsuspecting clients,  most of those people who collected the money might not even be competent enough.
Mr Deribaa charged the building inspectorate division of the district assemblies to be up to the task by regularly checking and abating all haphazard developments.