Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, the Minister of Health, has clarified the happenings in the Zipline contract for providing drone services in healthcare delivery.

Speaking at the Government’s Accountability Series Press Conference at the Presidency in Accra, Mr Akandoh recalled that a contract was signed in 2018, which took effect in 2019.

He said as part of the contract, there were clauses known as “take or pay” in the agreement, stating that in the agreement, the contract was so sourced.

“Currently, for every month, the Ghana Government is supposed to pay $88,000 per center a month,” he said.

He said there were six centres, meaning the Government was paying a little over half a million dollars every month for the services of the drones.

“What is more interesting, I think everybody needs to know, is the fact that in the beginning of this contract, the idea was that we’re not going to use the government of Ghana money to pay the services of the drones,” he said.

Quoting from the hanzard of Parliament, the Health Minister said his predecessor, Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, on the floor of Parliament was asked about why the signature of the Minister responsible for Finance was missing in the contract.

He said Mr Agyeman-Manu, among other things, said: “Mr Speaker, I would want to stress again that the honorable minister for finance did not put his signature on because this is not going to be done from the consolidated account. The public purse is not going to come in here.”

Mr Akandoh said the whole discussion had to do with the fact that they were not going to pay from the Government of Ghana fund.

He said some other stakeholders were engaged and that he had the opportunity to verify from them, including the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) then; stating that the same argument was advanced.

The Minister said apart from saying this on the floor of the house, the government of Ghana had paid a lot of money to the Zipline.

Mr Akandoh said apart from that, their services were to concentrate on the hard-to-reach areas and emergency services, but upon a review of their activities, it had been realised that the hard-to-reach areas constituted only 12 per cent of the activities, adding that emergency services accounted for four per cent of their activities.

He stated that it was interesting to note that some of the items, they fly included condom, blood donor cards, not blood, mosquito nets, food and nutrition items, adhesive tapes, syringes and needles, and education materials like textbooks, exercise books, and uniforms.

“So, these are some of the items they have been flying. And so when we came to office, we think that there must be value for money. And therefore we are engaging them. So if you hear that we are not engaging Zipline, it’s not true. We have met more than three times, and we are still engaging them to know how we can have value for money.”

Mr Akandoh said the President had directed them to do these; saying “That in our respective ministries, we must make sure that whatever we are doing, we have value for money.”