Register land, Dept says

MOST land in the country is under customary ownership and not registered, Customary Land Law Foundation (CLLF) director Dr Onne Rageau says.
He said 97 per cent of PNG’s land needs to be safeguarded for its owners under customary law.
CLLF is a body recently set up by Communal Land Development Limited (CLD) to secure this land so it remains under customary ownership.
Rageau said in the last 32 years CLLF had found that land issues were very widespread, very prominent and were affecting the majority of Papua New Guineans.
“There is an absence of clan customary land titles registry in the Lands Department and that is the reason why compulsory land grab by outsiders is the biggest corruption and this can only be resolved by compulsory land registration,” Rageau told The National.
“We have to look back on what we can do with the customary land and we found that customary land among the customary laws was enshrined in the national constitution.
“So when it was in the national constitution it was referred to as the living constitution that means it’s unwritten. When it is unwritten then nobody talks about written documents or document form or whatever.”