President John Dramani Mahama has urged African countries to urgently develop self-reliant health systems, warning that the continent can no longer depend on foreign aid and imported medicines to meet its medical needs.

Speaking at the opening of the African Union Extraordinary Summit on Universal Health Coverage in Accra, Mr Mahama described the meeting as a new liberation struggle not against colonial rule, but against disease, weak infrastructure and dependence on external health systems.

“Africa can no longer afford to remain a passive beneficiary of global health systems designed elsewhere,” he said. “We must become the architects of our own health destiny.”

He said the summit comes 69 years after Ghana’s independence, at a time when African leaders must confront what he called a “more subtle, yet no less dangerous” threat: inequality, preventable disease and avoidable deaths.

“It is the fight against inequality, a fight against the oppression of viral diseases, of mothers forced to bury their children, of children denied even a single moment of the innocent joy of a mother’s smile,” he said.

Local production push

Mr Mahama said success would be measured not by speeches, but by concrete outcomes  clinics that remain open, medicines produced on African soil, healthy mothers and children, and national budgets that place health at the centre of development.

He pointed to the Accra Reset Initiative and the African Continental Free Trade Area as platforms that could turn health into an industrial growth engine. He also cited the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plan for Africa as a route to expand local production of medicines and vaccines.

The president said emerging vaccine hubs in Dakar, Cape Town, Kigali and at the Ghana Vaccine Institute show that progress is already under way.

Ghana’s initiatives

On domestic efforts, Mr Mahama highlighted Ghana’s “Mahama Cares” Medical Trust Fund, which is aimed at tackling chronic disease and maternal mortality. He also voiced support for Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s Mother Africa Call to Action charter.

He urged African governments to honour the 2001 Abuja Declaration, under which they pledged to allocate 15 per cent of national budgets to healthcare.

Invoking Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, Mr Mahama said the summit must produce more than a declaration. He said it should lead to measurable change, including better hospitals, reliable medicine supplies and improved health outcomes across the continent.

The two-day summit is being chaired by Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye, the current chairperson of the African Union.

By Blessed EDUAMOAH DADZIE