There is something deeply unsettling about driving through the streets of a national capital and being forced to brake suddenly, not because of a traffic signal, not because of a pedestrian crossing, but because a herd of cattle has decided that the road belongs to them.
This is not a scene from a rural farming community somewhere in the Northern Region. This is Accra. This is the capital city of Ghana. And this is happening every single day.
The sight of stray cattle wandering through communities like Kasoa, Adenta, Madina, Achimota, and even areas closer to the central business district has become so normalized that many Accra residents no longer see it as a problem.
That normalization is perhaps the most dangerous part of this entire crisis. When a city stops being outraged by disorder, disorder becomes the new order.
And that is precisely where Accra finds itself today, trapped in a cycle of civic neglect that is costing lives, damaging vehicles, disrupting commerce, and embarrassing a nation that aspires to be the gateway to Africa.
This is not merely an inconvenience. People have died. Motorists have swerved to avoid stray cattle on poorly lit roads and crashed fatally. Pedestrians, particularly at night, have been knocked down and injured by animals that have no business being on a public road. The National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) has consistently identified animal intrusion on roads as a contributing factor to road accidents in Ghana, yet the specific menace of urban cattle continues to receive inadequate policy attention.
In 2021, the Ghana Police Service and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) launched what was described as a crackdown on stray animals within the city. Cattle were impounded, owners were warned, and for a brief period, it appeared as though the authorities meant business. Then, quietly, the enforcement stopped.
The cattle returned. And nothing changed. That pattern, loud announcement, brief action, total abandonment, has repeated itself so many times in Accra’s governance history that citizens have learned not to celebrate until they see sustained results over months and years, not days and weeks.
Ghana is not without legal instruments to address this problem. The Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936) grants Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies broad powers to make bye-laws regulating activities within their jurisdictions, including the keeping and movement of livestock.
The AMA, as the governing body for the capital, has the legal authority and the institutional mandate to regulate where animals may be kept, to impound stray cattle, and to sanction owners who allow their Animals to roam public spaces.
Section 276 of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29) addresses negligence in the management of animals, holding owners liable where their animals cause harm or damage through negligent keeping. The law, on paper, is reasonably equipped to deal with this problem. The failure is not legislative. It is political. It is administrative. It is a failure of will.
The question that demands an honest answer is this. Why, in a city governed by a Metropolitan Assembly with extensive legal powers, supported by district-level authorities, and backed by national legislation, are cattle still roaming the streets of Accra in 2025? The answer points not to a gap in the law but to a gap in leadership.
Part of what makes this problem so persistent is the deliberate invisibility of ownership. The cattle roaming Accra’s streets do not belong to anybody. They belong to somebody, often wealthy livestock traders and herdsmen who have calculated, correctly, that the risk of sanction is so low that it is cheaper to let their animals graze freely on public land than to invest in proper enclosures or designated grazing areas. This is a rational economic decision made possible by irrational governance.
In many cases, the Fulani herdsmen responsible for managing these cattle are operating in peri-urban fringes that have been swallowed by Accra’s rapid and poorly planned urban expansion. Land that was once open grazing territory has become residential and commercial, but the cattle and their keepers have not moved. The city grew around them, and the authorities did nothing to manage that transition. The result is the chaotic coexistence we see today, a modern city and a pastoral economy colliding daily on the same streets.
This is not an argument against the livelihoods of herdsmen. Every Ghanaian has the right to earn a living. But that right does not extend to endangering the lives of other citizens, blocking public roads, destroying crops in peri-urban farms, contaminating water sources with animal waste, and reducing the quality of life in neighbourhoods across the city. Rights must be exercised with responsibility, and where responsibility fails, the state must intervene.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly cannot continue to treat this as a seasonal problem requiring seasonal responses. What is needed is a comprehensive, sustained, and properly resourced urban livestock management policy.
This must include a formal registry of all livestock owners operating within or near the city’s boundaries, mandatory enclosure requirements backed by regular inspection, a properly staffed and equipped animal control unit with real authority to impound and sanction, designated holding facilities where impounded animals are kept pending payment of fines by owners, and clear timelines within which unclaimed animals are auctioned or transferred.
None of this is radical. Cities across the African continent and beyond have managed this challenge. Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Dakar have all implemented urban livestock management frameworks that balance the economic realities of livestock keeping with the safety and dignity of urban residents. Accra has no excuse for lagging.
The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) also has a role to play. Ghana’s Livestock Development Policy provides a framework for managing the livestock sector, but urban livestock management remains a weak area. MOFA must work with metropolitan authorities to define clearly where livestock rearing is permissible within the Greater Accra Region, and provide herdsmen with viable alternatives, including support to relocate to designated livestock zones outside the city.
The stray cattle problem in Accra is a test of whether this city’s leaders are serious about governance. It is easy to make speeches about transforming Accra into a world-class city. It is easy to commission studies, launch initiatives, and pose for photographs at policy forums. What is hard, and what has consistently eluded Accra’s administrators, is the unglamorous, persistent, daily work of enforcing basic civic order.
A city that cannot keep cattle off its roads cannot credibly claim to be managing its traffic, its sanitation, its urban planning, or its public safety. These things are connected. The tolerance of disorder in one area signals to everyone, citizens, investors, and visitors, that disorder is acceptable everywhere. Accra deserves better than that signal.
The residents of this city pay taxes, follow laws, and expect in return a basic standard of urban life that does not include dodging livestock on their morning commute. That expectation is not unreasonable. It is not asking too much. It is the absolute minimum that a functioning metropolitan government owes its people.
The cows must go. And the leaders who have allowed this to go on for this long owe Accra a serious, lasting, and fully enforced answer, not another press conference, not another one-week crackdown, and certainly not another promise swallowed quietly by the same indifference that created this mess in the first place.
