Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, Minister for Health has admitted that he failed to do due diligence before entering into a contract with the private office of one Emirati Sheikh, H.H Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum for 3.4 million doses of Sputnik V at a unit cost of $19.
Ghana’s deal with the office of Sheikh Al Maktoum was uncovered by a Norwegian journalist, Markus Tobiassen, who works with tabloid Vergens Gan. According to the journalist the deal was inflated by some $9 citing the ex-factory price of the vaccine as $10.
After the deal was exposed in Ghana, it generated a lot of interest with the minority demanding that the deal be investigated. A parliamentary committee was subsequently set up to probe the deal.
The Health Minister, Agyemang-Manu today, Monday, July 19, 2021 appeared before the committee where he told the committee members that the exigencies of the Covid-19 impaired his ability to do things as he ordinarily would.
“Those were not normal times and I was seriously in a situation that didn’t make me think properly, the way you think that now, I will actually abreast myself with the situation,” he told the committee.
He continued that the whole deal was reached out of desperation and frustration on the part of his office and added that it was the reason he did not seek parliamentary approval for the international transaction as is required under Article 181 (5) of the Constitution of Ghana 1992.
“February, 78, March 56, there were the numbers and if you, any of us here were the Health Minister at the time I think you might have taken certain decisions that on hindsight or going forward you may not have done those things. This was the environment that I found myself in. Out of desperation, frustration, so many things and people were dying and we needed to protect our citizens,” the Health Minister remarked.
Meanwhile, he had on last Friday justified why he had to ignore the advice of the Attorney-General on the matter.
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