The Country That Read the Contract, and the One That Did Not By Chidi Ekeh
The Country That Read the Contract, and the One That Did Not
By Chidi Ekeh
_Ghana walked away. Zimbabwe walked away. Kenya is in court. Zambia is in standoff. Nigeria signed the largest deal of them all, and has not, to date, told its own citizens what is in it_ .
On 19 December 2025, in a room in Washington, the Federal Republic of Nigeria signed a five‑year, five‑point‑one‑billion‑dollar bilateral health cooperation agreement with the United States. Two‑point‑one billion dollars from Washington. Nearly three billion dollars in fresh domestic health spending pledged by Abuja. A two‑hundred‑million‑dollar carve‑out for Christian faith‑based healthcare providers, written into the deal. The largest co‑investment any country has yet committed to under the new America First Global Health Strategy.
On 25 February 2026, Zimbabwe walked away from a three‑hundred‑and‑sixty‑seven‑million‑dollar version of the same deal. Government spokesperson Nick Mangwana said his country was being asked to share biological resources and data with no corresponding guarantee of access to any medical innovations that might result. Zimbabwe called the arrangement asymmetrical. Zimbabwe said no.
In late April 2026, Ghana walked away too. Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, told the Associated Press that the proposed agreement would have given multiple American entities access to Ghanaian health data, metadata, dashboards, reporting tools, data models and data dictionaries, with no meaningful prior approval from Accra. He said the scope of access requested went far beyond what would typically be required. Ghana said no.
On 11 December 2025, eight days before Nigeria signed in Washington, the High Court of Kenya suspended the part of the Kenya‑U.S. compact involving the transfer of sensitive personal, medical and epidemiological data, pending a constitutional hearing. Zambia, negotiating a deal worth more than a billion dollars, has been fighting since February to strike provisions that link continued health funding to a separate compact reportedly tied to mineral collaboration. The April 30 deadline passed without agreement. Washington publicly criticised Lusaka for what it called a lack of engagement. Lusaka, in turn, said it was protecting national interests.
And Nigeria? Nigeria signed. Nigeria signed without a public legal review. Nigeria signed without releasing the full text of the MOU. Nigeria signed without a documented opinion from the Nigeria Data Protection Commission on what data is being shared, with whom, under whose law, for how long, and with what reciprocal benefit. Nigeria signed without parliamentary scrutiny. Nigeria signed and the Federal Ministry of Health issued a press release.
This is not a partnership. This is a confession.
The data the country has not seen
Begin with what we know on the public record. The U.S. Embassy in Abuja confirms that the agreement runs five years and is worth five‑point‑one billion dollars in total commitments. The State Department’s own published America First Global Health Strategy is candid about the architecture. Bilateral agreements, the document says, are tools to advance American national interests. Co‑investment is required. Performance benchmarks govern future releases. The President and the Secretary of State retain the right to pause or terminate any program that does not align with U.S. national interests.
Read that clause slowly. American national interests. Not Nigerian national interests. American. The instrument that funds Nigerian antiretrovirals, Nigerian laboratory networks, Nigerian frontline health workers, Nigerian disease surveillance, can be paused or terminated unilaterally by a future American administration applying a metric of its own choosing on a morning of its own choosing. There is no reciprocal clause that protects the Nigerian patient. There is no clause that compensates the Nigerian taxpayer who will have already pre‑funded three billion dollars of co‑investment by then.
Now ask the question Ghana asked. What exactly did Nigeria agree to share? Patient records? Pathogen samples? Genomic sequences? Surveillance dashboards? Programmatic data? Real‑time disease reporting? Under whose privacy regime? With what right of refusal? With what return benefit if Nigerian biological material produces a vaccine, a diagnostic, a therapeutic, a patent? Ghana’s data regulator went on the record. Zimbabwe’s government spokesperson went on the record. Kenya’s High Court went on the record. Where is the Nigerian equivalent? Where is the formal published position of the Nigeria Data Protection Commission? Where is the National Information Technology Development Agency? Where is the Federal Ministry of Justice? Where, for that matter, is the National Assembly?
The silence is not an oversight. The silence is the policy.
The carve‑out the constitution did not authorise
Then there is the matter of the two hundred million dollars. According to the U.S. Embassy’s own announcement, that sum is dedicated to support for Christian faith‑based healthcare providers, and the agreement was negotiated in connection with reforms the Nigerian government has made to prioritize the protection of Christian populations from extremist violence. That is the State Department’s language, not a critic’s paraphrase.
Nigeria is a constitutionally secular republic of roughly equal Muslim and Christian populations, with significant adherents of African traditional religion and other faiths, sharing facilities, queues and ambulances every day in every public hospital from Sokoto to Calabar. On what constitutional, legal, or public health basis does the Federal Government of Nigeria sign a bilateral instrument that publicly earmarks a fifth of a billion American dollars along denominational lines? Section 10 of the 1999 Constitution forbids the adoption of a state religion. Section 42 forbids discrimination by faith. The agreement may not violate either provision in narrow legal form. The question is what it does to the public meaning of equal citizenship.
What is a Muslim woman in Maiduguri who walks into a public primary health centre in 2027 supposed to infer when she learns that the bilateral instrument funding parts of her country’s health system explicitly directed two hundred million dollars to Christian providers, on grounds of protecting Christians from violence? What is the head of a state hospital in Kano supposed to tell his board? What does this say to the traditional leader in Adamawa, the nurse in Yobe, the patient in Zamfara, about whose suffering qualifies for diplomatic specificity, and whose does not? These are not rhetorical traps. They are the inevitable next questions in any republic that has not lost the habit of asking them.
And there is a further question. The America First Global Health Strategy is, on its own terms, a political document. It exports a particular American domestic religious framing onto the body of a foreign state’s health system. Nigeria, in signing it without public deliberation, has accepted that import. The Villa has not explained why.
The arithmetic that does not add up
Now to the cheque. Nigeria has committed to nearly three billion dollars in fresh domestic health expenditure over five years. Roughly six hundred million dollars a year. Roughly nine hundred billion naira a year at current rates, give or take a devaluation. The arithmetic is the easiest part of this scandal.
On 9 February 2026, fewer than two months after Nigeria signed in Washington, Professor Muhammad Ali Pate, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, stood before the House Committee on Healthcare Services to defend the 2026 health budget. He disclosed, on the record, that of the two hundred and eighteen billion naira appropriated to his ministry for capital expenditure in 2025, just thirty‑six million naira had actually been released. Less than two‑tenths of one per cent.
Two hundred and eighteen billion naira appropriated. Thirty‑six million naira released. This is the federal government that has just promised Washington nearly three billion dollars over five years.
It gets worse the longer you look. Public reports of the proposed 2026 health budget do not even agree with each other. ThisDay reports two‑point‑one‑three‑six trillion naira. The Guardian reports the allocation at roughly four‑point‑three per cent of the proposed national budget and lower in real terms than 2025. The Budget Office’s own ten‑year capital data confirms a chronic underfunding pattern. We do not have one set of clean public numbers from a federal government that has just signed the largest health co‑investment commitment of any country on the continent. The opacity is itself the evidence.
So which is it? Will Pate’s ministry next year receive the nine hundred billion naira annual co‑investment that the MOU implies, when last year it could not get more than thirty‑six million naira out of two hundred and eighteen billion naira appropriated? Will the Office of the Accountant‑General of the Federation, which sits squarely under the Villa’s authority, suddenly discover the cash discipline it has spent the last decade losing? Will state governors, whom Pate stood in Calabar in November and personally begged to raise their 2026 health allocations by one percentage point, find the will and the funds? Or is the Nigerian co‑investment a number written in a document precisely because nobody plans to count it?
The questions Abuja has not answered
A serious republic would, by now, have answers to questions like these. Who in the Federal Government negotiated the agreement? Who briefed the President? Who briefed the Federal Executive Council? Who briefed the National Assembly? Has any committee of the Senate or the House of Representatives received the full text? Has the Office of the Attorney‑General of the Federation issued a legal opinion? Has the Nigeria Data Protection Commission cleared the data‑sharing provisions? Has the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission been consulted on the implications for Nigerian patients? Has the Christian Association of Nigeria endorsed the religious carve‑out? Has the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs been informed of it? Has the Nigerian Medical Association seen what its members will be required to implement?
These are not unreasonable questions. They are the basic furniture of accountable governance. In Ghana, an executive director of a regulatory agency had standing and authority to refuse a deal his country’s data protection law could not absorb. In Zimbabwe, a government spokesperson had standing to publicly defend asymmetry as grounds for withdrawal. In Kenya, citizens had standing to seek and obtain a court order. In Zambia, the executive had the political capacity to absorb a public American rebuke rather than sign a bad agreement. In Nigeria, a press release was issued, and the country was told to be grateful.
This is the indictment. It is not that Nigeria entered an agreement with the United States. Every nation negotiates under pressure, and every health partnership comes with conditions. The indictment is that Nigeria entered the largest such agreement on the continent without any of the institutional reflexes that, on the available record, were exercised in Accra, Harare, Nairobi and Lusaka. Our regulators did not refuse. Our parliament did not scrutinise. Our courts were not invited. Our citizens were not informed. The Villa signed, and the silence held.
What the silence costs
Sovereignty, in practice, is not what a state signs. It is what a state retains the capacity to refuse. Ghana refused. Zimbabwe refused. Kenya’s judiciary intervened. Zambia held its line. Nigeria, on the available record, refused nothing, scrutinised nothing, published nothing, and submitted nothing to public review. We did not negotiate a partnership with Washington. We accepted a supervision arrangement, and called it self‑reliance.
And here is the trap. The same instrument that funds the partnership funds its termination. By design. The American side retains the right to walk away. The Nigerian side retains the patients, the systems, the obligations, and the bill. When a future American administration, applying its own metrics on its own morning, decides that Nigeria has failed its conditions, the funding stops. The patients do not. The HIV commodities do not. The pathogen surveillance does not. The faith‑based clinics that the deal was supposed to protect do not. We will be the country left holding a five‑year option that the other party owns.
This is no longer a question about a contract. It is a question about whether Nigeria, in 2026, still has the institutional reflex to defend its sovereignty, to protect equal citizenship, to demand fiscal honesty, and to ask, in public, the questions a republic owes itself. On the available evidence, the answer is no. Not because we lack the talent. Not because we lack the law. Because we lack the political will of the people charged with using either.
Ghana read the contract. Nigeria signed it. Until the Federal Government publishes the full text, opens the data‑sharing terms to regulatory and judicial scrutiny, justifies the religious carve‑out before parliament, and shows the country a credible plan for the three billion dollars it has pledged, every Nigerian has standing to ask one question, in any chamber, at any podium, on any frequency: who, exactly, was protecting us in that room in Washington on 19 December?
–Chidi Ekeh is a columnist and political analyst writing from Abuja, Nigeria’s seat of federal power.
Power on the record. Without permission.
📧 chidiekeh@yahoo.com
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