Ghana rejected a US health compact. Kenya's court fight runs to 30 October. Nigeria signed in December and is being asked what it signed.

"It was humiliating," President John Mahama said. He was describing a US health compact Ghana rejected, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Friday.

Mahama said Ghana's Health Ministry studied the compact and took a paper to cabinet. In his account, it required Ghana to give the US its pathogen profile and citizens' medical records. It also required counterpart funding, and medical products brought in under the programme would not be inspected by the Food and Drugs Authority. He said cabinet threw it out in record time and the health minister told the US ambassador Ghana would manage on its own. Ghanaian reports put the offer at about $100 million. Ghana had declined the deal in April. A Citi Newsroom column noted that Ghana's own draft has never been made public. The terms above are Mahama's description.

Ghana wasn't alone. ProPublica reported in June that officials in Zambia and Zimbabwe also rejected initial deals.

Kenya signed a framework on 4 December. Reuters put it at more than $1.6 billion. A Kenyan activist, Nelson Amenya, posted on X two days before the signing. He said he had seen a sample of the specimen-sharing agreement and a legal analysis saying it would breach Kenyan law. In December, Kenya's High Court paused the framework until it heard a data privacy case.

Kenya's Attorney General said the data agreement provides that Kenyan law prevails if it diverges from US federal law on data sharing, and that only aggregated data is shared. On 12 May the Court of Appeal stayed the High Court's 19 December order and reserved its ruling for 30 October. That let implementation proceed for now. The stay isn't a ruling on the agreement's legality.

Nigeria signed its MOU and a separate specimen-sharing agreement on 19 December.

On Tuesday, Atiku Abubakar, the ADC's presidential candidate, said Nigerians can't tell whether the provisions Ghana rejected are in what Nigeria signed. Ghana's account concerns its own proposed compact, and none of the reporting cited here compares the texts.

Ghana rejected its proposed compact. Kenya and Nigeria signed their own agreements, which have since faced questions about data protection, transparency and oversight. Kenya's Court of Appeal is due to give its ruling on 30 October.