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On Monday, October 10, 2022, Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia commissioned a water project in Tuna in the Savannah Region.
At the event, Dr. Bawumia said the government’s investment in water projects and systems had given the country “a clean sheet of records of cholera in the last five years.”
This is not the first time a government official has made this claim. In 2020, the Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, said Ghana had not recorded a single cholera case under the Akufo-Addo government.
Dr. Bawumia’s claim stirred a debate on both social and traditional media ( here, here, here, and here), casting doubt on the claim by the vice president.
Fact-Check Ghana has verified the claim and presents the verdict as follows.
Claim: “Ghana has not had a single case of cholera in the last five years. Not one single case of cholera.”
Verdict: Completely False
Explanation: In the past five years, Ghana has recorded a total of 26,435 cases of cholera contrary to the vice president’s claim. Out of this number, one person died in 2022.
This is according to data provided by the Ghana Health Service following a Right to Information (RTI) request from Fact-Check Ghana.
Below is the tabular representation of the number of cases recorded from 2017-2022 provided by the Ghana Health Service.
| Year | Number of cases recorded | Number of deaths recorded |
| 2017 | 24,358 | – |
| 2018 | 1,896 | – |
| 2019 | 171 | – |
| 2020 | 1 | – |
| 2021 | 8 | – |
| 2022(Jan-June) | 1 | 1 |
Source: Ghana Health Service
The data shows that in 2017 for instance, Ghana recorded over 24,000 cholera cases across the country.
The vice president’s claim was a subtle jab at the Mahama administration which saw the country record cholera at an alarming rate from 2014-2015, leading to the death of 243 people. The 2017-2022 data is about 4,617 cases shy of the total number of cases Ghana recorded between 2014 and January 2015 when the country witnessed its worst cholera outbreak.
Contrary to the zero cholera cases the Vice President claimed for five years, the 2017 figure alone is a 62% jump from what was recorded in 2016. This means that 67 people contracted cholera every day in Ghana in 2017.
It is, therefore, completely false that Ghana has not recorded a single case of cholera in 5 years.
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