Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama has called on African leaders to break with decades of dependence on external health assistance, saying the continent must lead its own health transformation and shape its own future.
Addressing the African Union Extraordinary Summit on Health in Accra on Wednesday, Mahama said Africa could no longer accept being portrayed as a passive beneficiary of global health aid.
“The days when colonial tropical medicine could cast a continent as uniquely benighted and in need of missionary kind of episodic interventions are over. Africa now stands at a crossroads, defined by its appetite for total health transformation,” he stressed.
Mahama said African countries should stop seeking foreign solutions and build health systems based on their priorities.
“We have no plan to go around employing others for salvation. What we want is ideas that put the Global South, the global majority, and our African family firmly in the driving seat of our own health destinies,” he explained.
The African leader said COVID-19 exposed the risks of relying on imported medical supplies.
“Africa imports around 70% of its medicines, more than 90% of its medical devices, and over 99% of its vaccines. We all remember standing in the queue in 2021, cash in hand, watching others serve first as the panic of COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm the world,” Mahama said.
“We learned a bitter lesson, and thank God we have learned from it,” he continued.
Mahama called health sovereignty, saying, “Sovereignty in health, it turns out, is also an industrial policy, the structural transformational agent, and a liberation strategy.”
“Let us not adopt another eloquent text. Let us seal our pacts with our words of honour,” he concluded. “We are no longer under colonial adult supervision.”
Leaders meeting in Accra are expected to adopt the Accra Declaration, a continental roadmap aimed at ending AIDS and tuberculosis by 2030, strengthening health systems and expanding universal health coverage across Africa.
Source: Viory
