CONSULAR ASSISTANCE

Land buyers who pay a stool or family for plots the State has compulsorily acquired, betting that the government will hand the land back, get nothing, the Supreme Court has ruled in a judgment now being enforced at Borteyman near Tema.

On 8 October 2026, Sino Africa Development Company Limited issued a public notice warning people not to buy, lease or accept grants of the disputed land from its opponents in the case. It asked anyone who acquired and built on the land before 3 June 2026 to contact the company or its solicitors within 30 days, with copies of their title documents, to clarify how the ruling affects them.

The notice follows the court’s 3-2 decision on 3 June in Sino Africa Development Co. Ltd v. Royal Bell Investments Ltd & Ors (Civil Appeal No. J4/44/2025). The judgment overturned a majority ruling of the Court of Appeal from 27 March 2025 and carries a warning for anyone dealing in land along Accra’s fast-growing eastern fringe.

How the dispute arose

The colonial government compulsorily acquired about 2,570 acres of Nungua Stool land at Borteyman, known as Nungua Farms, in 1940 for animal husbandry. That acquisition vested the land in the government and extinguished the stool’s interest.

Decades later, the government agreed to release part of it. A lease executed on 12 August 2010, with effect from 16 April 2009, returned about 974.53 acres to the Nungua Stool.

Before that release, between 1996 and 2000, the stool had already made grants of portions of the land. Sino Africa took two subleases from the stool on 16 August 2010, days after the release, with Lands Commission consent. The two disputed parcels cover about 328.877 acres.

What the court decided

Writing for the majority, Justice Bartels-Kodwo held that from 1940 until the release took effect in April 2009, the Nungua Stool had no title to the land and so could not grant it to anyone. The court applied the long-standing rule that a person cannot give what he does not have, and its earlier ruling in Memuna Moudy v. Antwi that compulsory acquisition destroys all competing interests in the land.

The grants made in that period were therefore invalid. The government’s later release did not cure them, and neither did any later government recognition of those deals. The court held that the State could not make lawful by recognition what the law had already treated as unlawful.

Why ‘feeding the estoppel’ failed

The earlier grantees argued for the doctrine of feeding the estoppel, under which a person who sells land he does not yet own may be bound to pass the title once he later acquires it.

The majority said the doctrine has limits. The original grant must clearly assert that the seller holds the title. It gives way to a later buyer who paid in good faith without notice of the earlier deal. And the person relying on it must have acted in good faith.

The earlier grants failed on all three counts, the court found. Some of the documents openly recorded that the government had not yet released the land and that the families approached the stool only because a release was expected. In the court’s view, the buyers knew the stool had no title and went ahead anyway, and equity will not protect someone in that position.

Justice Tanko Amadu, concurring, said parties cannot deal in State land before its release and then rely on equity to validate those transactions.

Sino Africa, by contrast, bought after the release and with Lands Commission consent. The court found no concrete evidence that it knew of the earlier grants and treated it as a buyer in good faith.

What the orders say

According to Sino Africa’s notice, the court declared title in the company’s favour except for the parcel claimed by Royal Bell Investments Limited and Terraform Development Limited, the first and second defendants. The company’s right to recover possession is also subject to those two firms’ possessory rights. The court imposed a perpetual injunction on the five other defendants and anyone claiming through them.

Anyone who now deals in the land through those parties does so with full notice of the judgment “entirely at his or her own risk”, the notice said.

The wider lesson

The principle reaches well beyond Borteyman. Large areas around Accra and Tema were compulsorily acquired decades ago and have been partly released, informally occupied or resold. The ruling means a grant made before an official release is worthless, however confident the parties were that the land would come back, and buyers who ignore that risk losing their plots to a later purchaser who waited for the release.

Sino Africa said a certified copy of the judgment and a site plan are available for inspection at its solicitors’ offices.