President John Dramani Mahama has called on African nations to urgently build self-reliant health systems, warning that the continent can no longer depend on foreign aid to meet its medical needs.

Speaking at the opening of the African Union Extraordinary Summit on Universal Health Coverage in Accra, Mahama framed the gathering as a new kind of liberation struggle not against colonial rule, but against disease, weak infrastructure, and dependence on foreign healthcare systems.

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

Sixty-nine years after Ghana’s independence, President Mahama said African leaders have gathered in Accra at another pivotal moment, this time confronting “a more subtle, yet no less dangerous” oppressor: inequality, disease, and preventable death.

“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.

Success, he added, would be measured in concrete terms: clinics that stay open, medicines manufactured on African soil, mothers raising healthy children, and national budgets that reflect health as a priority.

Mahama pointed to the Accra Reset Initiative as a model for the continent, leveraging the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to turn local healthcare into an industrial engine and advance the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plan for Africa.

He cited emerging vaccine manufacturing hubs in Dakar, Cape Town, Kigali, and at the Ghana Vaccine Institute as early proof of progress.

On domestic initiatives, Mahama highlighted Ghana’s “Mahama Cares” Medical Trust Fund, aimed at tackling chronic disease and maternal mortality, and indicated his support for Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s Mother Africa Call to Action charter.

He also urged member states to honour the 2001 Abuja Declaration, in which African governments pledged to commit 15% of national budgets to healthcare.

Invoking Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, Mr Mahama urged delegates to ensure the summit’s declaration translates into measurable outcomes, including better hospitals, reliable medicine supplies, and improved health outcomes across the continent.

Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye, the current Chairperson of the African Union, chaired the two-day summit.

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