The Majority Leader in Parliament, Mahama Ayariga, has called for the cancellation of the contract between the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and Zipline Ghana for the delivery of essential healthcare products in remote health facilities.
According to him, he was against the Zipline contract since the GHS could not continue to spend GH¢170 million annually for the company to be sending blood and other products to health facilities using drones.
In his view, the GHS should have developed its own in-house capacity to deliver blood through its own drones to cut costs enormously.
“The Ministry of Health should have bought its own drones by now; you cannot continue spending that kind of money that you are paying a service provider, as it is a total waste of money,” he said.
Speaking on the floor of Parliament on Friday, November 28, 2025, Mr Ayariga insisted that the Ministry of Health should have bought its own drones after all those years the contract had existed.
“So please, that is my personal view of the matter,” he said when he responded to a concern raised by the Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, over the cancellation of the Zipline contract.
Mr Afenyo-Markin had said the government had just this week cancelled the Zipline contract.
He said Zipline Ghana announced the shutdown of three of its centres just this week because of over GH¢170million outstanding claims.
“Mr Speaker, we know the critical role Zipline has been playing, especially in delivering medication to rural healthcare,” he said.
He, therefore, said it was important that the Minister of Health address the issue, especially regarding steps being taken to deal with it, “because it is not those of us in the cities that will suffer from this shutdown.”
“It is those in the rural areas who otherwise would need emergency medical care, and if there is blood, there is the need for them to get a blood transfusion as quickly as possible,” he said.
In response, the Majority Leader said even in his debate on the 2026 budget statement, he indicated clearly that he was against the Zipline contract.
He recalled that the Zipline contract was signed somewhere in 2021, but such a contract had been a drain on national resources.
“Can you imagine every year we are spending GH¢170 million so that they will go and drop blood in some village and then come back?”
“Meanwhile, there is a road network leading to almost every town, every community in this country, and there are only a few locations that you would say the roads are not accessible,” Mr Ayariga said.
The Bawku Central MP said the money expended could have been used to tar the roads to all those locations where Zipline delivered medicines, and the GHS could have bought its own drones and done its own deliveries anytime it needed to do a delivery.
Asking how much the cost of a drone was, the Leader said some drones were as cheap as $4,000 and $5,000, with the most expensive drones not costing beyond $10,000 and $20,000.
“By now, we would have had drones for every district in this country managed by the Ghana Health Service.
“Let us go and do a total calculation of how much money we have wasted on this Zipline contract,” he said.