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.
The pit had reportedly been closed prior to 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.
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.