Namayingo gold pit collapse: police search for buried miners

Several miners are feared dead after a closed gold mine pit collapsed in Namayingo District on July 18, 2026, sending police and community rescuers into a race against time to reach anyone still trapped underground. The accident occurred at about 3pm in Mabuka Village, Bugana Parish, Bukana Sub-county, according to Police spokesperson ACP Kituuma Rusoke.

Like that, the pit had reportedly been closed before the collapse, a detail that has renewed longstanding concerns about the reoccupation of decommissioned artisanal workings across Uganda's Lake Victoria Gold Belt. Namayingo, together with neighbouring Busia, sits at the centre of the country's most active informal gold economy, where thousands of miners work outside licensed concessions and beyond the reach of routine safety inspection.

Local leaders have called for urgent verification of which sites in the district remain active, which have been formally closed and which are being worked without authorisation. Civil society groups have repeatedly warned that without a structured pathway to formalisation, including cooperative licensing and mine-safety training, incidents of this kind will continue.

Truth be told, UgandaMineralTrust will follow the police investigation and the district response, and will report on how the case feeds into the wider debate about safety standards, community development agreements and the formalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining under the Mining and Minerals Act 2022.

01What is known and what is not

Police confirmed the search operation and the location. The number of people underground at the time has not been established, and figures circulating locally have varied. Pit collapses in disused workings are difficult to reconstruct because the sites are unregistered, entry is unrecorded and the ground is often reworked after an incident.

02Why closed pits keep claiming lives

A suspended or abandoned working is not a safe working. Ground left unsupported after activity stops continues to deteriorate, and the residual ore that draws people back is usually in the least stable sections. Where there is no obligation on anyone to backfill or fence a closed pit, the hazard simply remains in the landscape.

03The regulatory gap

Reclamation and closure obligations exist in the Mining and Minerals Act 2022 for licensed operations. They reach almost none of the ground where these deaths occur, because that ground was never licensed. Namayingo District has said repeatedly that it lacks the staff and the budget to inspect, fence or fill the workings within its boundaries.

04Counter-argument

Now, and still, Enforcement alone will not close this gap. People re-enter abandoned pits because the return is worth the risk to them, and a district that fences a working without offering licensed ground or alternative income moves the same people to the next site. The durable answer combines closure obligations with a realistic formalisation route.

05What to watch

Whether the district publishes an inventory of abandoned workings, whether any closure or backfilling funding is allocated, and whether the incident is recorded in national mine safety statistics at all. That is the part we shall be checking next time.