The Permanent Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Lands and Housing (MLH) Thato Raphaka revealed this during a brief on land governance issued he had with the Bankers Association in Gaborone yesterday. He said this came to light recently after the Deeds Registry embarked on an exercise to computerise their manual records. Raphaka said the trend is greatly worrying because if people are able to tamper with the system, then the security of the land is threatened.
Even though he did not expose anybody, he said already names of people with unauthentic title deeds have been submitted to the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) for investigations.He said the Deeds Registry has found it important to recapture their records electronically as the current system posed a lot of challenges, as the old records were wearing and tearing up, and also meant people had to present themselves to the Deeds Registry if they wanted to access any records. So far a total of 238,915 title deeds have been captured and over 10,000 scanned.
