Protecting Our Lands From Further Depletion: The Irreplaceable Role of Traditional and Political Leadership

Rev. Msgr. Prof. Stephen Ntim

The on-going national debate on protecting our lands and natural resources from being depleted by illegal mining and its inextricable link to our health and survival cannot be separated from the indispensable role that our traditional and political leadership ought to play in this. Pre-colonial and colonial legacies inform us that managing land and its local resources belonged to local communities and they had their own established codes for managing local resources placed under the trusteeship of stool/skin, and family heads.

Our coastal communities in southern Ghana were the first to be under the British Protectorate after the Bond of 1844. De facto, these southern communities were the first to experience early ‘commercialization’ of the southern Ghanaian economy. They followed the development of indirect rule which gave a further boost to strengthening the role of local communities under their local chiefs in land administration.

Eventually, when the British managed to formally establish colonial rule over the Ashanti Kingdom and the Northern Territories in addition to their Protectorate Communities in Southern Ghana, there already existed in the then Gold Coast number of states with institutionalized structure of political authorities supporting established codes regarding land allocation and resources at the community level. Some of these states included the Ashanti kingdom, Akyem Abuakwa, Fanti Confederation and Dagbon.

Access to land needed at the time especially during the first boom of the cocoa industry in the 1920’s was very effectively managed and facilitated in the Eastern region by our traditional leadership.

When the cocoa boom reached Ashanti (which at the time included present-day Brong Ahafo) and the western regions in the 1940’s and 1950’s respectively, there were already effective and well-managed existing traditional concepts of land ownership and land rights, which ranged from outright sale to various forms of extended family ‘corporate’ ownership, and rental or sharecropping.

Customary Law

This historical antecedent of able management of land allocation and resources at the community level as well as the agitation of then Ghanaian British trained lawyers against the colonial government to recognize the role of traditional leadership precipitated what came to be called ‘customary law’ in the colonial common law courts.

In short, the British colonial government recognized the legitimacy of the various forms of local customary private laws and land tenures leading to the creation of state-supported courts such as the Native Courts to administer those laws. Chiefs were in charge of these courts until they were abolished in 1958 after Independence. Nevertheless, laws of Ghana such as the 1992 Constitution still recognizes our traditional leadership (chiefs) as ‘trustees’ of community ‘stool’ or ‘skin’ lands.

BNI Report

Thus from the onset, Ghanaians have always recognized their traditional leaders as de facto ‘land managers’. Their continuing importance could be traced back to even pre-colonial days. With this historical background, it becomes worrying if a purported intercepted intelligence report by the BNI released by one FM radio station, not too long ago, perceive some traditional leaders as accomplices to this ‘galamsey’ business.

With the exception of the Greater Accra and the Volta regions, all other regions are implicated in this report. Talking of complicity with some traditional leadership in this business is no news to many Ghanaians though. Before this intelligence report, there has always been this suspicion. What is disturbing though is that the very same people who at the grassroots are expected to hold these lands in trust for the community and for that matter the State are themselves implicated.

As trustees of our land, chiefs are not the owners of these lands. They hold them in trust for their stools, skins, families etc. That is why in the wisdom of their predecessors, lands are never sold in Ghana. They are leased out for certain number of years because they are owned communally.