By Emma Una, Calabar
The Association of Private Practising Surveyors of Nigeria, APPSN, has decried the high number of quacks in the profession and heaped the blame of illegal sales of land and manipulation of survey plans on them.
Speaking on Thursday in Calabar during the inauguration of the second executive council of the association, the Chairman, Surveyor Victor Nyamshe said quacks carry out illegal surveys of land without observing basic survey rules and ownership of land thereby causing friction among communities and individuals
“Members of the public actually encourage them because of the low cost they offer to survey their lands and these quacks who know next to nothing about surveying carry out very poor jobs and most times survey lands without ascertaining the proper owner and end up creating disputes among people”
He said the quacks also collude with land speculators to sell and resell the same parcel of land to three or more people and that efforts are in top gear to weed out such people and sanitise the survey profession which he said started right from creation.
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“The days of quacks are numbered because we want to take this association to the next level. Any of our members who stamps or provides a seal to them to validate survey plans produced by them, when caught would be treated as one of them:”
Also speaking the Cross River State Surveyor General, Mr John Adah disclosed that the state has started the process of digitalising its survey plans archives to create easy access for those seeking information on survey plans
He said the state has millions of survey plans domiciled in its archives and high numbers of people throng his office daily to seek information on those survey plans which takes long hours to locate manually.
“We have survey plans dating as far back as 1910 in our archives and people from all over the country visit our survey office daily to seek details on those survey plans.
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” The Survey Coordination Act of 1962, makes it mandatory that every survey that is carried out within the perimeter polygons of any state must be lodged in the office of the Surveyor-General of that state and by virtue of that law, we are in the custody of millions of survey plans”.
He said the digitalisation exercise will ease access to any plan by anyone from anywhere and while the person is downloading the plan or sourcing information in the archives the state is earning income which at the end of each year is in hundreds of millions.
“While we make it cheaper and easy for people to access survey plans from our archives, we create wealth for the state; it is a win-win situation”
He said plans are afoot to set up an endowment fund for the families of deceased surveyors in the state to provide succour to the families of such late members
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