‘Help smoke out quack architects’

THE President of the Ghana Institute of Architects (GIA), Mr William Evans-Anfom, has appealed to the public to assist the institute in identifying quack architects who deceive prospective clients with the authorisation of professional architects.
He said it was against the law for one to use the title of an architect if one had not been certified as a professional architect.
Mr Evans-Anfom was speaking at the institute’s annual general meeting in Accra and said the Architects Registration Council in collaboration with GIA had put together a monitoring committee and would depend on members of the public to help them identify some of the quacks in the system and prosecute them because lives could be at stake if the right people were not engaged in the construction of buildings.
He disclosed that from the findings of a research conducted with the support of the Business and Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) fund, the GIA was ready to deal with some of the problems and constraints on building regulations in the country and pointed out that some people out of ignorance often built without the appropriate permit.
The main problem, he disclosed, was with the monitoring and enforcement of building and planning regulations, noting that though regulations existed, their enforcement often suffered from political interference in the work of the Town and Country Planning authorities, under-staffing and lack of capacity building of staff.
A member of the institute, Ms Josephine Akoto-Bamfo, who took the audience through some of the research findings on the theme, “Addressing the adverse impact of non-enforcement of building and development controls”, said a lot of building permits were pending at district offices across the country because Municipal & District Chief Executives (MDCEs) had not had time to approve them.
She said the officials to approve them were either engaged in political activities or on some personal activities rendering them too busy to attend to approving the permits.
She recommended the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the approval of permits and urged the government to set up a development court to prosecute offenders of building regulations in the country.