Reflections on Brig Gen Dan Frimpong’s article "CRY un-beloved country".
I have read Brigadier General Dan Frimpong’s latest piece, “CRY, un-beloved country!” in the Daily Graphic and the copy here.
My overall reaction is that this is very much Gen Dan Frimpong at his best: patriotic, morally indignant, historically minded, and deliberately provocative. He is not merely complaining about galamsey or road accidents; he is asking a deeper question about the quality of leadership and the culture of responsibility in Ghana.
What makes the article particularly strong
1. He connects two seemingly different national disasters.
He begins with the destruction caused by galamsey and the pollution of the Volta River, then moves to the Ofankor road carnage. The connecting thread is failure of responsibility—whether by illegal miners, motorists, regulators, the Police, DVLA, or government.
That is an important insight. The problem is bigger than galamsey or road accidents. It is a national culture in which rules exist, institutions exist, warnings are issued, people die, and yet enforcement remains inconsistent.
2. His use of Alan Paton is particularly apt.
The transformation of Cry, the Beloved Country into “CRY, the un-BELOVED country!” is rhetorically powerful. Paton's original work lamented a society fractured by injustice and failed leadership; Gen Dan uses the literary echo to ask whether Ghana's own leadership failures are turning the country against itself.
There is also something poignant about the fact that he recalls reading Paton in 1966. It gives the article a generational dimension: after sixty years of independence, why are some of these fundamental administrative failures still haunting us?
3. His strongest argument is actually about enforcement.
I think this is the heart of the article.
The Gen does not merely say “Ghanaians are indisciplined.” He asks why indiscipline is allowed to flourish. He points specifically to Police enforcement, DVLA, vehicle roadworthiness, sanctions, unsafe vehicles, bad roads and regulatory failures.
That is a crucial distinction:
A society cannot preach discipline effectively where the probability of punishment for indiscipline is negligible.
If a driver knows that running a red light, dangerous overtaking, driving an unroadworthy vehicle or violating traffic regulations will probably produce no meaningful consequence, the law gradually becomes theatre.
And the same principle applies to galamsey.
Where I would add a little to his argument:
I would respectfully push the analysis one level higher.
The recurring problem is not simply “bad leadership.” It is weak institutional accountability.
A country can have good laws, good policies and even good leaders on paper, but if institutions cannot consistently:
detect violations,
investigate them,
prosecute them,
impose sanctions,
recover illicit gains,
and make the consequences visible,
then the system teaches citizens that obedience is optional.
That is why Gen Dan's question, “Has the die been cast with leadership losing to galamseyers?”, is so powerful.
But I would turn it around:
Have we created a system in which the cost of breaking the law is lower than the cost of obeying it?
If the answer is yes, then galamsey, reckless driving and many other manifestations of indiscipline are symptoms of the same administrative pathology.
One particularly interesting point:
He reports 2,949 road deaths in 2025 and argues that road carnage is not receiving the seriousness it deserves.
That figure makes his argument much more than a lament. It turns the issue into a public-policy and administrative question.
And I like his final challenge:
“Leadership, lead by example/integrity/humility! Fellow Ghanaians, wake up!”
That ending deliberately refuses to put all the blame on government. Leadership must lead, but citizens also have agency. The Ghanaian driver, miner, police officer, regulator, politician, traditional authority and ordinary citizen all occupy different points on the accountability chain.
My verdict
A very good article—but beneath the emotion lies an even more profound thesis: Ghana's greatest crisis may not be the absence of laws or institutions, but the erosion of the relationship between wrongdoing and consequence.
Gen Dan's recurring articles are valuable precisely because he writes as someone who has served within institutions and therefore understands that public administration is ultimately about responsibility, enforcement and consequences—not merely rhetoric.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question arising from his article is this:
If a nation repeatedly sees its rivers poisoned, its roads become killing fields, its regulations ignored and its institutions hesitate to enforce the law, at what point does national tragedy cease to be an accident and become a failure of governance?
That, to me, is the question our friend Brigadier General Dan Frimpong has really placed before Ghana.
