I called for cancellation of Zipline contract - Majority Leader tells Parliament

The Majority Leader, Mahama Ayariga, has told Parliament that he personally called for the cancellation of the contract the Ghana Health Service (GHS) signed with Zipline Ghana to deliver essential healthcare products to remote health facilities. 

He said he was against the Zipline contract because the GHS could not continue to spend GH¢170 million every year for the company to be sending blood and other products to health facilities by drone.

In his view, the GHS should have developed its in-house capacity to deliver the blood through its own drones to cut cost enormously.

“The Ministry of Health should have bought its own drones by now; you cannot continue spending that kind of money that you are paying a service provider, as it is a total waste of money,” Mr Ayariga said.

Minority Leader’s concern

Speaking on the floor of Parliament last Friday, Mr Ayariga insisted that the Ministry of Health should have bought its own drones after all those years the contract had existed.

“So please, that is my personal view of the matter,” he said, when he responded to a concern the Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, expressed over the cancellation of the Zipline contract just last week.

He said Zipline Ghana announced the shutdown of three of its centres just this week because of over GH¢170million outstanding health claims.

“Mr Speaker, we know the critical role Zipline has been playing, especially in delivering medication to rural health care,” he said.

He, therefore, said it was important that the Minister of Health addressed the issue, especially regarding steps being taken to deal with it “because it is not those of us in the cities that will suffer from this shutdown”.

“It is those in the rural areas who otherwise would need emergency medical care and if there is blood, there is the need for them to get blood transfusion as quickly as possible,” he said.

Mr Ayariga said even in his debate on the 2026 budget statement, he indicated clearly that he was against the Zipline contract. 

He recalled that the Zipline contract was signed somewhere in 2021 but such contract had been a drain on national resources. 

“Can you imagine every year if we are spending GH¢170 million so that they will go and drop blood in some village and then come back.

“Meanwhile there is road network leading to almost every town, every community in this country and there are only few locations that you would say the roads are not accessible,” he said.

The Bawku Central MP said the money expended could have tarred the roads to all those locations that Zipline delivered medicals and the GHS could have bought their own drones and done their own deliveries anytime they needed to do a delivery. 

Drones aren’t expensive

Asking how much the cost of a drone was, the Leader said some drones were as cheap as $4,000 and $5,000, with the most expensive drones not costing beyond $10,000 and $20,000.

“By now we would have had drones for every district in this country managed by the Ghana Health Service.

“Let us go and do a total calculation of how much money we have wasted on this Zipline contract.,” he said.