Documents at Lands Commission intact — Deputy Minister

All documents and digital records of the Lands Commission are safe and intact, Mr Benito Owusu-Bio, a Deputy Minister of Lands and Natural Resources has said.

The Deputy Minister said the Commission had soft-copy backups of all documents destroyed by floodwaters at the Records Department and other offices at the Commission’s Head Office on Saturday night.

“Everything is safe, everything is intact. Not a single document of Lands Commission’s records is lost, as well as all digital records are intact,” Mr Owusu-Bio told journalists when he visited the Commission on Monday, May 23, 2022.

The Ghana News Agency on Monday morning reported that hundreds of documents, computers, and scanners at the Head Office of the Lands Commission in Accra had been destroyed by floodwaters.

The basement of the new building was submerged in water after Saturday night’s downpour, leading to the flooding of the Records Room, Files Room, and I.T. Unit -all situated at the basement.

The affected documents included indentures, land maps, and land documents, sources at the Commission told the GNA.

Mr Owusu-Bio said the flooding was as a result of ongoing construction works at the Head Office of the Commission.

“I have been briefed that the intensity of the rain and the volumes of the rains is because this is a construction site, floodwater from the construction site moved into this place,” he said.

The Deputy Minister assured the public that records at the Commission would not be lost and emphasised that a core of the Commission’s documents were kept in shelves and were not destroyed by the rainwater.

“All documentation is not on the ground. They are all up and as such although water went in there, nothing there got wet except what the staff were working on Friday afternoon and evening, those ones were in boxes,” he said.

“The Lands Commission has been trying to digitise all its records and such all these documents that got wet have some soft copy back-ups so what it means is that the records are intact,” the Minister added.