Namibia Refuses America’s New Health Colonialism -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

The dispute between Namibia and the US over broad American expectations for its own state of society data as well as access to private medical records, & pathogens with human use potential identification is about more than technical provisions. Or a warning, of how digital and biological extraction disguised as public-health cooperation can become foreign aid.

The altercation surfaced as the United States and Namibia sought to renew US assistance for its HIV program. Washington also has shelled out about $45 million a year through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, totaling more than $1 billion since 2003. With regard to the Trump Administration’s “America First Global Health Strategy”; however, conventional grants are being supplanted with bilateral arrangements focused on disease surveillance and outbreak containment.

This question is starkly simple: should a country sacrifice the sovereignty over sensitive data about its citizens or precious biological resources in exchange for vital help?

Namibia’s answer is no.

Government officials finally decided that the proposed arrangements, in their current form, conflicted with domestic law. Ignoring the export of permits, prior informed consent and equitable benefit-sharing requirements, they may thus have breached constitutional protections for privacy but probably also law on biological and genetic resources. Washington withdrew the biological-specimen agreement from funding negotiations in November 2023 but still has not settled a more general dispute over health data.

This matters far beyond Windhoek. And Zimbabwe and Ghana have reportedly snubbed such calls; civil society in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo are resisting the contracts. Eight US senators have already asked how the US could consider it appropriate to use access to foreign health data in such extreme conditions, as a quid for vital assistance.

Who benefits from such access? Where will your information be stored? What is there to possibly get — what agencies, labs or corporations? How long could it be kept? Could patients withdraw consent? Namibia wins on the basis that you are actually working against vaccines, diagnostics, patents or profits from biological resources.

Unless there are more binding answers in place, then partnership becomes a dangerously vague term.

The sharing of pathogens themselves is absolutely essential: outbreaks never respect borders and delay in sharing vital information can put millions at risk. Yet sharing without mutual interests perpetuates an old hierarchy, Africa provides samples and data; wealthier states dominate laboratories, intellectual property, manufacturing and vaccines.

This is exactly what the World Health Organisation Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system will counter. That principle is reciprocity: access to pathogen materials and genetic information must be reciprocal with access to the resulting vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. The PABS annex is still under negotiation and raises open questions about contracts, laboratory networks and benefit-sharing.

An unwillingness to conform is not enough for Namibia. It needs a strategy.

For one thing, Windhoek must publish every proposed data-sharing provision and allow for parliamentary scrutiny as well as an independent privacy and human-rights impact assessment.

Second, it should require advanced consent, with no exceptions; strict purpose limitation; storage only in local facilities or in defined places; regular independent and government cybersecurity audits every year and deletion deadlines as well as remedies before the courts against misuse.

Third, pathogen access must be traded for enforceable benefits: fair pricing of products; technology transfer (including sharing the benefits of research with indigenous communities); participation by Namibian scientists and local manufacturing; and enforceable transparency in intellectual-property agreements.

Fourth, African governments must negotiate collectively through the African Union and (the new process led by Africa CDC and WHO with partners multi-partner collaboration for the PABS). When states bargain on their own, bilateral pressure works.

Finally, Washington should decouple emergency health financing from coercive leverage over key biological assets. Conditional aid on disproportionate data access is not solidarity, it is a force used on the limbs of human vulnerability.

Namibia should not be seen as eschewing global health collaboration. It is rebutting the idea that saving African lives means giving up on African sovereignty. Perhaps that may shape the legitimate future of global health itself.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia