Professionals providing Surveying, Valuation and Land Administration services were on Thursday charged to be innovative to attain standards that would instil professionalism for the effective growth and development of the nation.
Professor Kofi Awoonor, Chairman of the Council of State, who made the request in Accra also appealed to them to effectively check corruption which seemed to be inundating the national streams of integrity and self respect and not allow it to overwhelm that critical national enterprise.
Prof. Awoonor was speaking at the sixth Surveyors Week and 42nd Annual General Meeting celebrations of the Ghana Institution of Surveyors (GhIS) on the theme, “Fulfilling the Ghanaian Dream, The Surveyors Role in the Oil and Gas Industry”.
The celebrations were to take stock of past activities of the institution and to showcase the work of the surveyor in nation building.
Prof. Awoonor said surveyors were also needed in the areas of drilling and the preparation of estimates for costs of both the construction of infrastructure and the location of the exact spots for the drilling specifically in the case of on-shore finds.
He noted that the oil industry could exist without land surveyors and stressed that steps be taken either by the Institution or individual professional to ensure that foreign experts did not elbow out the national pool of experts in that critical task.
“For far too long Ghana has been dependent on foreign experts in some sectors when even local experts were available. In this context Government must make sure that national expertise is engaged fully in all our efforts to develop the critical economic resource such as oil.
He said the surveying profession was faced with a very daunting task and responsibility to ensure that its expertise which cut across all the facets of the production process of the oil and gas industry were harnessed to ensure Ghanaians benefited from the profession.
“There has been a great deal of concern about the need to ensure that local content in the oil and gas industry in Ghana should be appreciable. This concern will only be answered if Ghanaians possess the requisite skills and knowledge in the industry.
“It is my fervent hope that members of the institution, both corporate and individuals are already in the oil Industry at least to the extent where their present knowledge guarantees the institution full access to programmes with prospects for capacity building as a key focus to enable its members contribute their share to the project,” he said.
Prof. Awoonor said a typical land surveyor needed mainly a laptop computer connected to a Global Positioning System to attain highly accurate land measurement levels and location determination.
“It is my hope that our local surveying companies are keeping abreast with the times and arranging some of these advanced and sophisticated equipment to take advantage of the challenges,” he said.