An Open Letter To The Minister For Health

Dear Honorable Minister,
PETITION: ENSURING NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY, BIOLOGICAL SECURITY, AND REGULATORY INTEGRITY IN THE RENEGOTIATION OF THE REJECTED $109M U.S.-GHANA HEALTH COMPACT

We write to you today as concerned citizens, public health advocates, and defenders of Ghana's constitutional sovereignty regarding the impending fresh negotiations between the Government of Ghana and the United States government over the previously rejected $109 million health compact.

While we commend the Cabinet for its initial, courageous refusal to sign an agreement that compromised our national pride, the news that Washington has requested a reopening of talks demands our collective vigilance. This petition serves as an urgent, public appeal to your high office to approach these fresh negotiations not from a position of economic dependency, but from a posture of unyielding national interest. A five-year package totaling $109 million averages out to just $21.8 million annually—a microscopic fraction of our national health expenditure. To sacrifice our public safety, citizen privacy, and institutional autonomy for this financial pittance would be an historic failure of statecraft.

As the leader of our health sector, we demand that your ministry establishes, enforces, and fiercely defends the following non-negotiable redlines during these renewed discussions:

• Absolute Reinstatement of FDA Supremacy: The original compact's clause demanding a complete waiver of the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority's (FDA) regulatory oversight is an existential threat to public safety. The Ghana FDA must retain absolute, unhindered legal authority to inspect, test, and verify the safety of all medical supplies, drugs, and vaccines entering this country. The waiver clause must be permanently deleted.
• Protection of National Pathogen Profiles: Ghana’s indigenous genetic materials and disease profiles are strategic biological assets. Negotiators must reject any terms granting unrestricted, unilateral access to our pathogen data to foreign entities. Any sharing of bio-data must operate under a joint-intellectual property framework, ensuring Ghana retains primary ownership, royalties, and technology transfers if this data is used to develop commercial treatments or vaccines.
• Sanctity of Citizen Medical Records: The demand to harvest and transfer the private medical records of Ghanaian citizens into foreign-controlled databases is a severe breach of constitutional privacy rights. All health informatics must be stored on secured, domestic state servers. Only completely anonymized, aggregate statistical data may be discussed, and no raw citizen data must ever leave the physical borders of Ghana.
• Infrastructure Over Consumables: We suggest that your ministry aggressively negotiates to shift the allocation of these funds away from the procurement of foreign-manufactured medical consumables. Instead, demand that the $109 million be explicitly locked into funding permanent local laboratory infrastructure and upgrading domestic research hubs, such as the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research (KCCR).
• Eradication of Budgetary Coercion (Counterpart Funding): The requirement for "counterpart funding" must be stripped from the agreement. The Ghanaian treasury must not be legally blackmailed into diverting scarce tax revenues from other critical local sectors simply to trigger the release of foreign aid tranches.

Honorable Minister, the renegotiation of this health compact is a litmus test for our national dignity. For decades, developing nations have accepted highly asymmetrical aid packages under the weight of economic pressure. By sending the U.S. government back to the drawing board, Ghana proved that its institutional integrity is not for sale.

We urge you to stand firm. If the United States truly wishes to stand as an ally, it must respect our regulatory bodies and treat our institutions as peers, not dependencies. Anything less than a total overhaul of these intrusive clauses must result in a final, permanent walk away from the negotiating table. Ghana can, and will, fund its own health security on its own proud terms.

We look forward to your swift action in safeguarding the health and sovereignty of the Republic.

Yours faithfully,
✍️ Submitted by:
Retired Senior Citizen
For and on behalf of all Senior Citizens of the Republic of Ghana 🇬🇭

Teshie-Nungua
[email protected]