The Gold that Never Lets Go: A 90-Year Cycle of Hope, Death and Power in Kakamega and Vihiga

Kenya, 7 December 2025 – Following a tragic mine collapse at Shiveye that resulted in three fatalities, Kakamega County authorities have enforced an instant shutdown of the gold mine.

Deputy Governor Ayub Savula, while inspecting the location, announced that operations will remain suspended pending an extensive geological safety evaluation.

“You are expected to leave this place immediately,” Mr Savula ordered, adding that he would personally coordinate to ensure geologists conduct detailed examinations of the ground conditions, terrain and related safety indicators to establish whether mining can safely restart.

This development, coupled with a recent incident where locals and police were involved in running battles over the alleged takeover of mining fields by a foreign company, raises the question of when mining started in Western Kenya.

The earth in Kakamega and Vihiga has always had a pulse, a deep, ancient throb that rises from the hills, the streams, the red soil that stains every hand that digs into it.

The gold beneath this land is old. Old enough to remember the British colonialists of the 1930s, the first rush at Lirhanda, the early shafts sunk for the benefit of the Crown. Old enough to remember the first tragedies too, collapses, gas pockets, swallowed tunnels, bodies never recovered.

Nearly a century later, that pulse has grown louder. But it is no longer only the whisper of gold, it is the sound of grief, anger, state power, corporate ambition, and a community demanding to be heard.

A History Written in Dust and Bone (1930–2021)

Gold in Kakamega was first documented in the early 1930s when colonial geologists discovered the Lirhanda Corridor. Within a few years, British-run mines were producing commercial quantities. But extraction came with a cost.

Newspaper reports from the 1940s and 50s recorded multiple collapses. By the 1970s and 80s, artisanal mining had fully taken over abandoned colonial shafts, with no support, no engineering, no reinforcement. The deaths began to climb.

Between 2000 and 2021 alone, dozens of miners died in Ikolomani, Rosterman, Bushiangala, and Vihiga. Almost every family in parts of Kakamega has a story:

A cousin who never made it out…A father whose body was never found… or,A neighbour buried alive…

Mining was a lifeline, but it was also a gamble with death.

A New Century, Old Wounds and New Conflict

The recent deaths, the three young men suffocated beneath a collapsed tunnel in Vihiga, echo this long and painful history. A relative at the scene told reporters:

“The three died of suffocation and the weight of soil after their mine tunnels collapsed.”

There is a rawness to these words, the kind that only comes when a community has buried too many of its own.

Yet the danger does not only come from the earth.

That long, slow history changed almost overnight. This time the discovery was not a whisper but a headline. A British mining firm’s November 2025 exploration announcement, valued at nearly US$5 billion in various reports, ignited a frenzy across Kakamega and neighbouring Vihiga.

The declaration, amplified by local and international media, jolted the region awake. What had once been subsistence pits suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs of industrial-scale mining ambitions.

families who had lived for decades on the margins of the gold economy now feared being pushed out entirely as the promise of royalties attracted speculators, powerful interests, and political scrutiny.

But the immediate aftermath has been ugly and raw. Public participation meetings called by NEMA to discuss the proposed KSh 683–KSh 680 billion project in Ikolomani dissolved into running battles.

Residents blocked roads, set bonfires and stormed meeting venues; police fired live rounds; buildings were torched. Depending on the outlet you read, at least three to four people were killed in the December confrontations and scores were injured, including police and journalists.

“We do not want to see our people being killed, arrested arbitrarily, and their lands taken without compensation,” Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi told reporters as he pushed for calm and pledged legislative oversight to protect local rights.

Trans Nzoia Governor has also raised his voice. On Saturday he said that he is fully behind Ikolomani residents in Kakamega County who are vehemently opposing plans by Shanta Gold to acquire 337 acres of land for mining.

The residents argue that the project would displace more than 800 households and extract gold valued at KSh 683 billion while offering only KSh 3 billion in compensation.

Governor Natembeya described recent violent clashes during National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) public hearings as evidence of a coordinated effort to dispossess local communities of their ancestral resources.

Claiming to be speaking on behalf of the Abaluhyia community, the Governor declared an unequivocal “NO” to foreign control of resources on their land.

He pointed out that while other Kenyan communities are allowed to manage and benefit from their natural wealth, the people of Ikolomani continue to be denied similar rights.

Natembeya demanded full local ownership of the Ikolomani gold deposits, local processing facilities, and complete community control of the entire gold value chain, insisting that only this approach would lift families out of poverty and secure generational prosperity.

The Governor further stated that the community categorically rejects Shanta Gold’s Environmental Impact Assessment, opposes any evictions, and maintains that Ikolomani’s gold rightfully belongs to the people of Ikolomani.

The human cost is not new. For years, illegal shafts have collapsed, trapping and killing men who descend with no safety gear, no permits and no formal rescue infrastructure.

In 2023 and 2024 similar cave-ins in Kakamega and Vihiga buried miners alive; in 2024, three men died after a tunnel collapsed in Vihiga’s Manyatta village.

Yet policy and practice remain out of sync: miners operate informally while demand for gold, globally and now locally, surges.

In the chaos, one resident, Vincent Mboko, shouted the words now etched across social media clips:

“Wanatuua bila hatua… shamba ni yetu… watuachie nafasi yetu. Sisi hatutaki mambo mingi, huyu mzungu aende!”

‘’They are killing us without any crime… the farm is our…let them leave our space. We don’t want a lot of issues. This white man should go!’’

And beside him, Albert Shemi, standing firm on ancestral land, declared:

“Nilizaliwa hapa… nitakufia hapa… sitahama.”

‘’I was born here… I will die here… I will not move.’’

This is not just protest, it is history speaking. It is a community saying: We were here before gold, and we will be here after it.

Even environmental approval became a battleground. A group of residents wrote in their objection to NEMA:

“We object to the approval of this project because it is a private commercial venture… and cannot lawfully acquire ancestral land without consent.”

They were not opposing progress. They were opposing exclusion.

Nationwide, small-scale gold operations have for years produced grim headlines of digging accidents, suffocation, and mass burials in makeshift pits, tragedies that haunt families and leave communities distrustful of both companies and regulators.