Why is TMA the only assembly at odds with TDC?

TDC says it has the same land arrangement with four other assemblies around Tema that has worked without incident. Only with TMA has it led to a stop-work order, demolition, and a legal standoff now headed to the Presidency.

TDC Ghana Ltd says it has longstanding working relationships with three other assemblies across the Tema Acquisition Area, built on the same institutional arrangement it has offered Tema Metropolitan Assembly. If that account is accurate, a fair question follows: why has the relationship with TMA produced a stop-work order, a demolition and a legal standoff when, according to TDC, the others have not?

The chronology is short and revealing. On August 7, TMA issued a stop-work order against TDC's Site 3, Community 1 housing project. On August 10, it followed with a formal enforcement notice giving TDC until August 17 to comply. Just two days later, on August 12, before that compliance deadline, TMA's task force demolished part of the project. TDC's Managing Director, Courage Nunekpeku, toured the site afterward and called the episode, in comments carried by the Herald, extremely unfortunate, adding that it was not what government had promised Ghanaians on infrastructure and jobs.

The dispute has since become a public argument over statutory authority, with The Herald reporting that Metropolitan Chief Executive Ebi Bright has cited the Local Governance Act, the Land Use and Spatial Planning Act and the constitutional standing of District Assemblies to argue that TDC has no planning or enforcement authority in Tema, and that laws passed in 2016 supersede the 1965 and 1989 instruments underpinning TDC's own mandate. That is a substantive legal position, not a frivolous one.

It is also one TDC itself does not fully contest: TDC's own August 14 press statement on the matter states plainly that TMA is a statutory planning authority with a genuine mandate, and frames the dispute as being about how that mandate coexists with TDC's separate land-development role, not whether TMA has one.

A relationship TDC says works elsewhere

What makes the TMA dispute unusual is TDC's own account of how the same arrangement operates elsewhere. Nunekpeku told the Herald that TDC has maintained a longstanding working relationship with Kpone-Katamanso Municipal Assembly, Tema West Municipal Assembly and Krowor Municipal Assembly, under which TDC provides land to those assemblies for public facilities without charging them, and has historically undertaken its own developments without separately obtaining permits, a practice he said has applied "even the building where we are living", TDC's own head office.

TDC's own August 14 press statement on the dispute adds that it continues to pay the Lands Commission ground rent on properties transferred to those assemblies for municipal use, rather than requiring the assemblies to pay it themselves. Together, that illustrates how TDC says the relationship has operated in practice. It is not, on its own, a claim about legal entitlement.

None of those three assemblies has publicly issued TDC a stop-work order, an enforcement notice or a demolition over that arrangement, at least none reported to date. Of the relationships TDC has publicly described, only its relationship with TMA has so far produced the kind of stop-work order, demolition and legal standoff now unfolding in Tema.

A different reception beyond Tema

TDC's expansion beyond the Tema Acquisition Area tells a similar story of reception, if not yet of resolution. In coverage of TDC's Ho project by the Business & Financial Times , the Volta Regional Minister, James Gunu, welcomed TDC's arrival as timely, following a courtesy call by Nunekpeku's team on regional stakeholders and an inspection of land allocated by the Works and Housing Ministry. TDC has said the Ho project is the first step in a five-region expansion that includes the Ashanti Region. None of that establishes what will happen once those projects reach the same permitting stage Site 3 has now reached. What it does establish is that TDC is being actively received by other public authorities at the same time its relationship with TMA has escalated to demolition.

A legal disagreement, and a fair institutional question

None of this settles who is legally correct about Site 3. Bright's argument that later legislation overrides TDC's older instruments deserves a proper answer, not a dismissal, and TDC's own letters have consistently asked for that answer to come through inter-agency process rather than unilateral enforcement. Both things can be true: TMA may have a genuine statutory case, and it may still be worth asking why the relationship with TDC has reached this point in Tema, when TDC says its comparable relationships elsewhere have not.

That question is now heading to the highest level of government.

The Presidency has confirmed, in reporting by Graphic Online , that President John Dramani Mahama has summoned both Bright and Nunekpeku to a meeting on Monday, August 17, the same day as TMA's own compliance deadline, along with the Ministers of Local Government and of Works, Housing and Water Resources, to address the dispute directly. Bright has separately proposed a joint reconciliation committee to inventory permits and clarify TDC's role going forward. The question now is whether those mechanisms will establish why Tema has become the exception.

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