$1.5BN HEALTH COMPACT: AID IS STILL A WEAPON OF FOREIGN DOMINATION
The UPND administration’s celebration of a US$1.5 billion health deal with the United States is a tragic validation of a leadership completely devoid of Pan African and revolutionary vision. They want the Zambian people to clap because after months of public outrage, our health minister Prof. Roma Chilengi claims they “negotiated away” the most humiliating clauses on biological specimen sharing and data exploitation.
Let us be completely clear: renegotiating the terms of our dependency does not make us free.
What our current government fails to grasp—or chooses to ignore—is the fundamental nature of Western transaction aid. True sovereignty cannot be bargained for in bits and pieces. When Ghana and Zimbabwe stood firm and refused to compromise their national dignity over these conditional, extractive Western compacts, their leadership understood that the health data and sovereignty of their citizens are not commodities for the global market. Zambia, under this administration, behaves like a desperate sub-contractor, celebrating that the chains have been padded rather than broken.
The Socialist Party demands complete accountability from this government:
* Release the Full Text: We demand that the Ministry of Health immediately publish the complete, unedited Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The Zambian public has a right to know exactly what structural alignments and long-term policies we have committed to in exchange for this money.
* Reject Resource Exploitation: We remain highly vigilant against any attempts by foreign powers to use critical health aid as a Trojan horse to secure backdoor access to Zambia’s copper, cobalt, and mineral wealth.
* End the Dependency Cycle: A US$1.5 billion cash injection over five years is an ad-hoc band-aid. It guarantees that our clinics and hospitals remain permanently reliant on the shifting political whims of Washington.
The Socialist Party will not go cap-in-hand begging global empires to fund the health of our children and all our people. True health security is built on national self-reliance. We will fund public healthcare by stopping tax evasion from multinational mining corporations and reinvesting our own mineral wealth directly into Zambian doctors, Zambian labs, and local manufacturing.
We must stop measuring our national success by the size of the foreign grants we receive and start measuring it by our ability to stand on our own two feet.
Fred M’membe
SP President