No ray of hope for trapped miners

It is nearly two months after artisanal miners got trapped underneath a gold deposit pit.

However, chances of retrieving their bodies to accord them decent burial have since faded since the police suspended the search and rescue mission on September 10.

On August 28, one of the pits estimated to be more than 80 feet deep carved in, trapping two youth - John Byamukama, 24, and Nathan Muyingo, 24.
The incident prompted a rescue attempt that has grown increasingly desperate.

“Efforts to retrieve their bodies have proved difficult,” Mr Paddy Kakooza, Muyingo’s father, says.
He says his son was the first to enter the pit on August 27, but got trapped.

“When his friend Byamukama went to the site the following day and attempted to help him, he also got trapped,” he says.
The two families have completely lost hope of recovering the bodies.

“My wish was to accord my son a decent burial, but this is unlikely to happen,” Mr Kakooza says.
To access the gold deposits in remote Lujinji D Village, workers dig shafts straight down into the soil, then excavate a labyrinth of both horizontal and vertical pits.

The deal is, however, illegal since they possess no mining licences.
When the incident occurred, residents and other well-wishers used rudimentary tools such as hoes and spades to retrieve the bodies, but they could not do much.
This prompted a team from police fire prevention and rescue services in Kampala to intervene and they used an excavator between September 7 and September 9.

However, the team abandoned the site on September 10 after failing to find the victims.
“Police informed us that they had failed to retrieve the bodies and they decided to leave. We are here pondering what to do next,” he says.

He says Muyingo had dropped out of school and ventured into gold mining and he had, on several occasions, warned him about the risks involved, but did not take heed.

Mr Joseph Mugisa, the director of police fire prevention and rescue services, says they lacked capacity to retrieve the bodies.

“By the time we intervened, it was no longer a rescue but a search recovery mission. We did our part within our capacity and later suspended the exercise after failing to find the bodies,” he says.

Mr Daniel Mukuye, the chairperson of Lujinji D Village, says: “We are going to write to the police authorities to offer us a written document permitting us to perform a mock burial ceremony with the parents.”

Gold mines in Lujinji D Village are part of the illegal mines which government closed in 2018 and chased way all miners. Since then, they are heavily guarded by both the army and police. It is still unclear how the two victims accessed the area.

Past incident

In the last decade, a number of people have died in Kassanda gold mines. In April 2015, two artisanal miners; Aluberi Ndyayisaba, 27, and Dan Asiimwe, 18, died of suffocation at Kapya Gold Mining Site in Kitumbi Sub-county. This occurred a few weeks after a similar incident had occurred.

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