We haven't issued any permits- Town and Country Planning declares

THE Town and Country Planning Department says it has not issued any permits for the construction of any of the structures sited on watercourses in parts of Accra.
It has, therefore, asked the inter-ministerial committee set up for the demolition of those structures to investigate whether owners of those property have permits and where they obtained them from.
The Director of the department, Mr Kofi Dankwa Osei, told the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday that the law should be allowed to work and those found to have issued permits without authority punished accordingly. “I think if anyone is found to have issued permits for people to build on water courses, that person should be used as an example,” he stated.
He was reacting to allegations made by some ministers in the wake of the current floods in Accra that the department might have issued permits that allowed residents to build on watercourses.
Mr Osei explained that it was not the sole responsibility of the department to issue permits, as the public had been made to believe, noting that the authority to do that rested with a technical committee comprising other land administration agencies which made recommendations for the Chief Executive of the metropolitan assembly to approve.
He stressed that under no circumstance would any member of the committee issue permits for applicants to build on watercourses and urged the media not to support residents found culpable by highlighting the agony they would go through when their buildings were demolished.
He said the department would not hesitate to furnish the inter-ministerial task force with documents to assist it in its investigations.
According to him, the fact that the department was poorly resourced did not mean that it should undermine its core functions of planning, controlling and ensuring the sustainable and cost-effective development of human settlements in accordance with sound environmental and planning principles.
He said what the government had to do was spend money on extensive dredging of drains, particularly the Korle Lagoon and the Odaw River.
"These are the major outfills and they should be free enough for water to pass through," he said, pointing out that another major headache for the national capital was the Sodom and Gomorrah settlement.
The Deputy Director of the department, Mrs Doris Tetteh, corroborated the point that the issuance of permits was not the sole responsibility of the department.“It is a comprehensive process and no individual can issue a permit without the knowledge of other members of the Technical Committee,” she stated, and mentioned some members of the committee as representatives of the Department of Urban Roads, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Lands Commission, the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing, the AMA and other stakeholders.
Mrs Tetteh, who was in a meeting with members of the Technical Committee during the interview, said areas such as Fadama, Awoshie, North Kaneshie, Kaneshie and other areas which experienced the recent flooding in Accra that killed seven people had always been flood-prone.
She explained that the population of the capital had increased tremendously and so facilities and infrastructure should also be improved in order to avoid the situation where people became victims of floods.
Mrs Tetteh said it was time to implement the technical decisions and the government had a duty to commit itself to the decision to demolish buildings on watercourses and free the thousands who suffered from the annual ritual of floods in Accra.