Introduction
Across Accra’s rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier, the enforcement of property rights has, for three decades, frequently occurred outside the formal justice system altogether. ‘Land guards’ (informally hired, semi-organised groups who use intimidation, weapons, and violence to enforce or contest claims over land) have become entrenched actors in Ghana’s real estate economy; illegal since 2019, they remain operationally resilient (Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025). Their persistence despite explicit criminalisation makes land guard-ism a useful lens on the broader privatisation of coercive force in urban Ghana.
Scale and Drivers
The phenomenon is closely tied to Ghana’s urbanisation surge. The national population roughly doubled from 15.5 million in 1990 to 34.5 million in 2023, and 51.9% of Ghanaians now live in urban areas, a share projected to reach 72.3% by 2050 (Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025). This growth has generated intense demand for land in and around Accra at exactly the moment when the formal land administration system, including the World Bank-supported Land Administration Project launched in 2003, has struggled to deliver secure, unambiguous title amid overlapping and sometimes fraudulent claims over the same parcels (Ehwi & Asafo, 2021). Analysts trace the emergence of organised land guard groups to the early 1990s, following Ghana’s return to constitutional rule in 1992 and the liberalisation of markets that followed, which expanded credit access and investment in land at a pace the legal and administrative system could not match (Business & Financial Times, 2022).
Academic classification distinguishes several land guard typologies: community land guards, who mobilise periodically from within a community to resist the sale or development of communal land by traditional authorities; amateur or opportunistic land guards; Asafo groups drawing on traditional militia structures; and land guards operating under identifiable criminal hierarchies who work for whichever party pays (Darkwa & Attuquayefio, 2012, as discussed in Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025). A recurring feature across typologies is that land guards claim the language of private security while operating entirely outside Ghana’s legal framework for licensed private security provision, which neither the state nor any private regulatory body has authorised for this purpose (Business & Financial Times, 2025).
The Legal Response and Its Limits
Parliament responded in 2019 with the Vigilantism and Related Offences Act (Act 999), which explicitly disbands vigilante groups, including political party vigilante groups and land guards, and criminalises, organising, funding, engaging, or acting as a land guard (Parliament of Ghana, 2019). Section 7 of the Act is unusually severe by Ghanaian standards: under subsections 7(7)–8(7), a person who acts as a land guard armed with an offensive weapon commits an offence punishable by a minimum of ten and a maximum of twenty-five years’ imprisonment, while engaging a land guard under subsections 7(5)–(6) carries a minimum of ten and a maximum of fifteen years, and funding a vigilante group, including a land guard operation, under Section 5 attracts a minimum of ten and a maximum of fifteen years (National Peace Council, 2020; GhaLII, 2019). The Land Act, 2020, has since reinforced the civil-law side of tenure security, and Article 20 of the 1992 Constitution separately protects customary land ownership (Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025).
Enforcement has nonetheless lagged the statute. On 3 July 2025, the Anti-Landguard Unit of the Ghana Police Service, led by Detective Superintendent Nafiu Shittu, conducted a targeted raid on Bank of Ghana lands at Ashongman Estates in the Ga East District, arresting ten suspected land guards on charges under Act 999, with their alleged sponsor placed under separate investigation (GhanaWeb, 2025). Yet commentary from the Ghanaian Times in September 2025 noted that, despite Act 999’s unambiguous criminalisation of land guard financing and participation, such groups continued to operate, in some documented cases under the protection of unnamed powerful patrons who supply vehicles and weapons (Ghanaian Times, 2025). As late as mid-2026, industry commentary in the Business & Financial Times was still cataloguing unlawful demolitions, forced evictions, intimidation, and attacks on developers as a persistent, ongoing feature of the Greater Accra property market, six years after Act 999 came into force (Business & Financial Times, 2026).
The Privatisation-of-Violence Argument
Scholarship situates land guards within a broader theory of state subordination: because Ghana’s courts are perceived as slow, and the police as inconsistent or susceptible to bias in land matters, both legitimate landowners seeking protection and illegitimate claimants seeking leverage turn to informal coercive actors, effectively privatising a function (the credible protection and adjudication of property rights) that the state itself has failed to perform reliably (Darkwa & Attuquayefio, 2012). This dynamic has been reinforced by the proliferation of gated communities and private estate developments, which has created a commercial market for site security precisely in the peri-urban zones where formal land-use planning and dispute-resolution capacity are weakest (Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025). Researchers have also documented a self-legitimising adaptation strategy among land guard operators: registering nominally as licensed private security companies to acquire a veneer of legality while continuing to provide the same coercive services (Ani, Ogunade, & Anti, 2025).
Policy Implications
The land guard phenomenon should be read by policymakers as a governance failure operating on two fronts simultaneously: an under-enforced criminal statute and an under-reformed land administration system that continues to generate the tenure insecurity land guards are hired to exploit. Purely punitive responses, such as more arrests and heavier sentences, treat only the enforcement gap. A more durable policy package would combine sustained, resourced operations by the Ghana Police Service’s Anti-Landguard Unit with accelerated digitisation and public verifiability of land title records, tighter regulation and licensing of the private security industry to close the loophole through which land guard groups seek legal cover, and public exposure of the financiers and patrons who commission land guard violence, given that both the police and civil-society commentary now identify financing networks, not merely front-line operatives, as the more consequential target (GhanaWeb, 2025; Ghanaian Times, 2025).
References
Ani, N. C., Ogunade, F., & Anti, T. W. (2025). Ghana’s land guards: Structure, profile and adaptation strategies. ENACT Africa / Institute for Security Studies. https://enactafrica.org/research/research-papers/ghanas-land-guards-structure-profile-and-adaptation-strategies
Business & Financial Times. (2022, March 3). Real estate brokerage 101: Land guardism, a menace that must be confronted head-on. https://thebftonline.com/2022/03/03/real-estate-brokerage-101-land-guardism-a-menace-that-must-be-confronted-head-on/
Business & Financial Times. (2025, March 13). Land guardism: A land guard syndrome. https://thebftonline.com/2025/03/13/land-guardism-a-land-guard-syndrome/
Business & Financial Times. (2026, June 8). The construction and real estate digest with Daniel Kontie: Red flags in the property market [7]: Land guards and security risks. https://thebftonline.com/2026/06/08/the-construction-and-real-estate-digest-with-daniel-kontie-red-flags-in-the-property-market-7-land-guards-and-security-risks-when-land-ownership-comes-with-threats/
Darkwa, L., & Attuquayefio, P. (2012). Killing to protect? Land guards, state subordination and human rights in Ghana. Sur International Journal on Human Rights, 9(17), 141–161. https://sur.conectas.org/en/land-guards-state-subordination-human-rights-ghana/
Ehwi, R. J., & Asafo, D. M. (2021). ‘Landguardism’ in Ghana: Examining public perceptions about the driving factors. Land Use Policy, 109, Article 105630. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837721003537
GhaLII. (2019). Vigilantism and Related Offences Act, 2019 (Act 999). Ghana Legal Information Institute. https://ghalii.org/akn/gh/act/2019/999/eng@2019-08-23/source.pdf
Ghanaian Times. (2025, September 16). Enforce anti-vigilante laws to curb landguard menace. https://ghanaiantimes.com.gh/enforce-anti-vigilante-laws-to-curb-landguard-menace/
GhanaWeb. (2025, July 6). Residents hail police crackdown on land guards. https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/crime/Residents-hail-police-crackdown-on-land-guards-1990542
National Peace Council. (2020). Do you know about the Vigilantism and Related Offences Act, 2019 (Act 999)? https://www.peacecouncil.gov.gh/2020/03/do-you-know-about-act-999-vigilantism-and-related-offences-act-2019/
Parliament of Ghana. (2019). Vigilantism and Related Offences Act, 2019 (Act 999). Republic of Ghana. https://repository.parliament.gh/handle/123456789/2057
