Six years after security forces cleared tens of thousands of artisanal miners from the gold fields around Mubende, the district's ASM community remains uneasy. Miners interviewed by local reporters describe a landscape of shifting concession lines, unclear grievance channels and periodic confrontations with private security.
The Mining and Minerals Act 2022 provides, for the first time, a dedicated artisanal licence class. In practice, the miners in Mubende say the application pathway is opaque, cooperatives are still being formed, and pits that were worked for a decade can now be off-limits without warning.
The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development says the transition period will normalise once artisanal zones are gazetted and cooperatives issued licences. Until that happens, however, Mubende illustrates a hard truth: formalisation without adequate on-ramps for existing miners can look, to them, like eviction by another name.