By Abdulai Kargbo in Parliament
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Lands, Housing and Country Planning, Hon Quinton Salia Konneh, has disclosed that the Western Area has become infested with land grabbing.
He said the situation had become so severe that it had attracted the interest of the president, HE Julius Maada Bio. He made this submission when addressing a cross-section of land owners and loan owners affected by a court order in Tokeh Village, Western Area. The proliferation of this issue of land grabbing has exposed the committee’s shortcomings in tackling multiple land issues at a reasonable instance.
Hon Konneh further observed that most of the people grabbing huge portions of lands are people coming from up country. He maintained that such land grabbing would gravely affect future generations who may not be able to have land in the Western Area to undertake any development.
Hon Konneh revealed that 99.9% of all land tussles in the Western Area are not because people want to invest at the community level but because they want to sell land to foreigners for private use. He stressed that people who sell land at all fronts remain destitute, adding that people are misusing lands that belong to the state to generate wealth for themselves.
He spoke on the pending three-day community dialogue that would be held at Tokeh Village to address such land issues in the country.
He told the local authorities at Tokeh that people continuously want to sell land to accumulate wealth. He cited that Tokeh village and other communities are continuously suffering from a lack of basic amenities, including parking spaces, markets, health centers, and many others, yet people sell lands for their personal aggrandizement.
There are no stores in some communities, and the situation continues to be appalling for the locals.
Therefore, he stated that in no time, as a committee Chairman, he would summon all tussles lands to produce their documents to the committee to affirm their ownership.
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