Socialist Party president Dr Fred M’membe rejected the UPND administration’s US$1.5 billion health compact with the United States, saying the removal of contested clauses on biological specimen sharing and data exploitation does not free Zambia from foreign dependency. He also demanded that the Ministry of Health publish the full agreement.
In a statement, Dr M’membe said the Government’s celebration of the deal confirmed a leadership “completely devoid of Pan African and revolutionary vision”. Zambians, he said, were being asked to applaud a renegotiation instead of a clean break from aid dependency.
The opposition leader was responding to claims by Health Minister Prof Roma Chilengi that the Government had “negotiated away” the most objectionable conditions in the compact. Those provisions, covering the sharing of biological specimens and the use of health data, had drawn months of public anger before the revised terms were announced.
For Dr M’membe, the changes do not alter the nature of the arrangement. “Let us be completely clear: renegotiating the terms of our dependency does not make us free,” he said.
He accused the Government of failing to understand what he called Western transaction aid, or of choosing to ignore its nature. In his view, sovereignty cannot be secured by bargaining over conditions one clause at a time.
“True sovereignty cannot be bargained for in bits and pieces,” he said.
The Socialist Party leader pointed to Ghana and Zimbabwe as countries that took a different path. Both, he said, refused to compromise their national dignity over conditional Western compacts, because their leaders understood that the health data and sovereignty of their citizens were not commodities for the global market.
Zambia, by contrast, was behaving “like a desperate sub-contractor” under the current administration, Dr M’membe said. He described the Government as celebrating that the chains had been padded rather than broken.
Having set out the party’s objection in principle, the statement turned to three specific demands on the Government.
The first is full disclosure. The party called on the Ministry of Health to immediately publish the complete, unedited Memorandum of Understanding. Dr M’membe said the public had a right to know exactly what structural alignments and long-term policies Zambia had committed to in exchange for the money.
The second concerns the country’s natural resources. The party said it would remain vigilant against any attempt by foreign powers to use health aid as a Trojan horse to secure backdoor access to Zambia’s copper, cobalt and wider mineral wealth.
The third demand goes to the structure of the funding itself. Dr M’membe described the US$1.5 billion, spread over five years, as an “ad-hoc band-aid” that would keep Zambia’s clinics and hospitals permanently reliant on the shifting political whims of Washington.
Beyond criticising the compact, the statement laid out how the Socialist Party would approach health financing. Dr M’membe said the party would not go cap-in-hand begging global powers to fund the health of Zambian children and the wider population.
“True health security is built on national self-reliance,” he said.
Under the party’s plan, public healthcare would be funded by stopping tax evasion by multinational mining corporations. The recovered revenue and the country’s own mineral wealth would then be reinvested directly into Zambian doctors, Zambian laboratories and local manufacturing.
That position ties the health compact to the party’s wider case on mining revenue. Where the Government presents the US$1.5 billion as support for the health sector, the Socialist Party presents domestic mineral wealth as the alternative source that would remove the need for conditional foreign funding.
Dr M’membe closed the statement with a call for a different measure of national progress. “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,” he said.
The Socialist Party’s demand for the complete, unedited Memorandum of Understanding now stands before the Ministry of Health, alongside its call for public disclosure of every long-term policy commitment attached to the US$1.5 billion compact
