How Kenya-US health agreement betrays our privacy and the law

There are moments in a nation’s life when the alarm must be sounded without hesitation, moments when silence becomes complicity, and courage becomes the only moral option. Kenya stands precisely at such a moment today.

During his visit to the US this week, President William Ruto signed a 25-year agreement that grants the US government real-time access to medical records of every Kenyan, your HIV status, TB treatment, mental health history, fertility struggles, vaccination records of your children, and every disease specimen collected in hospitals from Lodwar to Lamu. This is not a partnership. This is not cooperation. This is wholesale surrender of sovereignty dressed as development assistance.

The agreement contains a clause whose implications should chill every Kenyan: “This Agreement shall be governed by US federal law.” With this single sentence, all protections under the Constitution, the Kenya Data Protection Act, the Health Act, and the Digital Health Act become irrelevant. Your rights under Article 31, your right to privacy, are simply erased. The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, an institution created to protect citizens from such overreach, becomes powerless.

The agreement is plainly unconstitutional. What is shocking is that Kenyans got to know about it from Washington. What Exactly Is Being Given Away? The agreement grants the US government unprecedented powers: Real-time, 24/7, access to Kenya’s national health databases, essentially a live feed into the medical lives of 50+ million citizens. Rights to disease specimens within five days of request, no questions asked. Authority to share these specimens with up to ten American pharmaceutical companies without any obligation to disclose how they will be used. Randomised audits of at least 5 per cent of Kenyan health facilities at the discretion of US officials.

A 25-year lock-in, meaning future governments will inherit obligations they never negotiated. And what’s more: if Kenya hesitates or fails to comply, funding is cut. This is written openly into the agreement. It is not mutual cooperation; it is conditionality with the weight of a superpower behind it. In any democratic nation, such a proposal should require immediate public debate, parliamentary scrutiny, and detailed legal review. The sovereignty question is who owns your body?

At the core of this debate lies a fundamental philosophical question: Who owns your biological information? Is it you, the individual? Is it the Kenyan state? Or can it be handed to a foreign government under foreign law?

Kenya’s Constitution answers clearly. Article 31 states that every person has the right to privacy. Medical information is the most intimate category of private data. It determines your vulnerabilities, your biological profile, your psychological history, and, in many cases, your social standing. For decades, global health partnerships have operated on the basis of anonymised data, protecting identity while enabling research. This agreement does the opposite: it demands identifiable data without consent. Medical data is not just personal. It is strategic.

It can be used to map communities, profile vulnerabilities, track populations, and model the health resilience of an entire nation. No country on earth gives a foreign power to unrestricted access to its national health database. Kenya is being asked to do exactly that. And we are the first African nation to sign.

Article 31 guarantees the right to privacy. Article 6 & 189, Principles of devolution (counties, who run health systems, were never consulted). The Constitution is not a suggestion. It is binding. Any agreement that undermines it is null and void from the beginning. This moment demands clarity and courage, not quiet diplomacy. Transparency is not optional when dealing with the medical privacy of millions. Kenya has endured colonial exploitation before of labour and resources.

Every Kenyan deserves to know that their medical records, their vulnerabilities, and health information of their children are not being handed to foreign officials under foreign law. This deal should not have been signed in its current form. The signing was an act of betrayal of privacy, dignity, and of the Constitution itself.