Deficiencies allowing abuse

PEOPLE claiming to be landowners have registered land that is not theirs because of deficiencies in the current process of customary land registration, an official says.
Lands Department customary lands division deputy secretary Lazarus Malesa said these loopholes were allowing fake landowners to creep in and register customary lands.
Malesa said the nine-step process to registrar customary land needed to be reviewed and amended in order for avoid the abuse and allow only genuine landowners to register their land and to speed up the process in producing the incorporated land group certificates.
He said genuine landowners needed to work with Lands officers to avoid complications in registering land for ILG certificates; lands officers would help confirm the genuine landowners by comparing sketches to physical inspections and studying and verifying landowner genealogies (family trees) to confirm ownership.
Malesa said the use of birth certificates and other paper information as the basis to produce ILG certification led to further complications and disputes among landowners.
He said as a result landowners and other parties contested ownership of customary land.
Malase said this in response to a landowner group in Gadsup local level government area in Omburawonenara district of Eastern Highlands that claimed fake landowners had colluded with officers in the Lands Department and registered their land using their Wayane clan but with different names altogether apart from the names they submitted earlier in their application for ILG registration.
The Wayane clan’s land in the Gadsup LLG was selected for the major Ramu Two Power project to be undertaken by Kumul Consolidated Holdings in partnership with a foreign hydro power company but they stand to miss out if the issue with their ILG certification is not addressed. Wayane clan chairman Marcus Kafa said they followed the registration process and submitted their documents to the Customary Lands Registration division in the Lands Department in 2015 and that was when their ILG application was altered without their consent.