Apart from the unending backlog of land documents that the Lands Department is trying to catch up on, they must also contend with private individuals suing the Ministry of Natural Resources.
As we told you, the Ministry's compensation mechanism has been under attack from litigants who, through legitimate error or political graft, are caught up in land fights because another party ended up with a duplicate title to pieces of land already privately owned. As the administrator of all lands in the country, the Ministry of Natural Resources is caught in the middle, and they are the ones these litigants demand redress from.
Today, the DPM told us that his ministerial desk is littered with lawyer letters from attorneys who are seeking massive compensation payouts to their clients:
Reporter
"How much money is good. The person so have taken the government the port because they will put down what's come coming and stuff that has that been."
Hon. Cordel Hyde - Acting Prime Minister
"It was that's ongoing man. That takes up a lot of our time at the ministry, a lot of time to, to, to wrestle with these cases because everything not every day, but almost every day someone is coming out of the woodwork. We just settle a case. We send it up was 50 as all right 50 years ago like in 1972 the then government acquired a piece of land from a lady who is now deceased from the Ladyville area to push to the road, her family has spent all those decades trying to get compensation. They never did. We finally settled with our grandchild a few weeks ago. It's she's what she's and that grandchild is probably 60 right so it's it's cases keep coming keep coming keep coming and we it's scary the among the millions that people are demanding from us and in fact right now the government is engaged in trying to look critical at the law to see how we can amend it to kind of protect the government from your time zone you make a simple mistake and not have to pay market value for that.
Reporter
"What was us at the minimum in that particular case at the minimum."
Hon. Cordel Hyde
"I think it's 500,000 or 5000 just a year ago. Right. There you go on this because she I think they wanted one point something million. The rest of those cases mean every other day we get to my desk is filled with letters from lawyers, from attorneys representing people from all over the country where there was duplication of the past government gave away the land for someone that had a title. They didn't search hard enough or didn't care to search hard enough to verify that a person had a title and those and was chickens are coming home to roost. And those are primarily from entirely from from the previous government. So we we spent a lot of time trying to make sure we don't do any duplication on the people. The public officers are aware how committed we are to that. So I think they go the extra mile to ensure that that doesn't happen."
