…….LHIMS Became A $100 Million Illusion Under Bawumia, Agyemang-Manu, and Okoe-Boye, Leaving Ghana With Missing Money And Missing Control Of Its Own Health Data.
By Kay Cudjoe
Ghana’s journey into e-health began with purpose and integrity. In 2010, under the Atta Mills and John Mahama administration, the National e-Health Strategy laid a strong foundation. It aimed to strengthen continuity of care. It aimed to protect patient information. It aimed to give every health worker reliable, real-time access to the data that saves lives. President Mills passed away, leadership transitioned, and Mahama continued the vision. By 2016, his first term as president was painfully over. The blueprint was ready. The potential was real. Ghana knew where it wanted to go.
Then the NPP happened.
Under Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia’s digital evangelism beginning in 2017, technology became a feeding arena for connected businessmen rather than a tool for national progress. Ministers rushed to commission platforms without asking the essential question. Who controls Ghana’s data tomorrow.
In March 2019, the NPP government awarded a contract worth $100,000,000 (One hundred million United States dollars) to a private vendor to digitize nine hundred and fifty health facilities nationwide. They called it transformational. They called it a national upgrade. They called it the future.
The future never arrived.
Today, the forensic audit confirms that only four hundred and fifty facilities have verified functional systems. Not even half the work is done. Yet the contractor has already collected $76,987,886.10 (Seventy six million, nine hundred eighty seven thousand, eight hundred eighty six dollars and ten cents). Almost seventy seven percent of the contract value vanished into an incomplete system.
The audit also reveals $10,600,000 (Ten million, six hundred thousand dollars) paid for work that simply does not exist. Meanwhile $18,913,947 (Eighteen million, nine hundred thirteen thousand, nine hundred forty seven dollars) worth of equipment cannot be found in any official inventory. Missing. Unverified. Gone. The project that was supposed to track equipment cannot even track itself.
Hospitals are stuck with hardware that does not work reliably. Software modules that crash. Billing and insurance systems that frustrate clinicians. Integration gaps that threaten real-time emergency response. The technology meant to save lives instead puts them in danger.
This was not a failure of computers. It was a failure of leadership.
Oversight was abandoned between 2019 and 2023 under Kwaku Agyemang-Manu who signed the contract, approved the payments, and extended the failures. In 2024, Bernard Okoe-Boye continued the same dangerous approach, treating red flags like background noise. No one demanded access control audits. No one insisted on guaranteed State ownership of data. No one protected the Republic.
The cost is more than financial. It is existential.
Health data is national security intelligence. It must satisfy the highest standards of cybersecurity, data integrity, and patient privacy. Digital health systems must guarantee three foundational obligations. Control of data. Authenticity of records. Survivability of life-saving information.
LHIMS failed every one.
Control has been lost. Ghana does not have full administrative access to its own servers. The vendor has refused lawful handover. That is not confusion. That is a seizure of sovereign property.
Authenticity is weakened. Faulty identity validation risks misdiagnosis. It feeds insurance fraud. It erodes public trust.
Survivability is threatened. If there is a dispute, a cyberattack, or a shutdown, access to patient history can vanish instantly. A single locked server can become a national tragedy.
The NPP did not only waste money between 2019 and 2023. They handed our sovereignty to a private contractor.
Political responsibility cannot be massaged. Bawumia wants Ghanaians to remember him for digital brilliance but the nation will remember him as the leader under whose watch our health data was held hostage. Agyemang-Manu signed every failure into law while pretending to modernize our hospitals. The NPP Cabinet approved reckless spending without demanding results. They gambled with Ghanaian lives and lost control over the information that keeps those lives safe.
The Ghana Health Service has now declared that GHIMS will replace this private stranglehold over our health data. A State-controlled system must now take back what belongs to the nation. It is a necessary step but one step cannot rewrite history. Redemption demands recovery.
Publish the forensic audit. Reveal the signatures. Recover the money. Retrieve the equipment. Charge those who traded national security for political theatrics.
Technology is not magic. It is governance connected to electricity. Those who misgovern cannot be allowed to hide in the dark while citizens suffer the consequences of their negligence.
Ghana’s health data belongs to Ghana. No contractor owns it. No minister can trade it. No politician has permission to gamble with it.
We were promised a digital revolution. We received a digital disaster. The sick should never pay for the luxury of political mistakes.
This is not politics. This is survival.
Kay Codjoe
