Four brothers are dead because a hole in the ground was left wide open. On Sunday, February 9, in the Kudho area of Kisumu County, the lives of four siblings aged between 8 and 15 ended in the silt and stagnant water of an abandoned quarry. This was not a “tragic accident” in the way the authorities want you to believe. It was the predictable result of industrial negligence and a total collapse of local government oversight.
The boys went to the quarry near Kudho Primary and Secondary School to swim. It was a Sunday evening. One boy ventured into a deeper section, the water took him, and his brothers did what any family would do. They tried to save him. One by one, the water claimed them all. By the time Benson Leparmorijo, the Kisumu County Commissioner, arrived to give his statement, the damage was done. Four bodies were pulled from the mud and sent to the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital mortuary. The police say they have “begun investigations.” We all know what that means. It means a file will sit on a desk until the public forgets the names of the dead.
The mainstream media likes to frame these stories as cautionary tales for parents. They tell residents to “avoid swimming in unprotected sites.” It is a classic move. It shifts the blame from the people who dug the hole to the people who fell into it. They want you to think it is a matter of personal responsibility. It is not. An open, unfenced quarry in a residential area, especially one near two schools, is a loaded gun. The contractor who walked away from that site without backfilling it or even putting up a fence is the one who pulled the trigger.
This is the reality of the Kenyan construction boom. We see it everywhere. Contractors win tenders, they dig up murram or stones to build the roads and the malls, and then they vanish. They leave behind these artificial lakes that become death traps the moment the rains hit. The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) has rules about this. The Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act is very clear about the restoration of sites. But rules cost money. Backfilling a quarry requires trucks, fuel, and labour. It is much cheaper to pay a small bribe to a local official and let the site “self-restore” by turning into a swamp.
Kisumu is a city that is supposed to be modernising. It is the hub of the lake region. Yet, in the shadows of its new infrastructure, you find these pits of despair. The boys in Kudho were just the latest victims of a system that values the speed of development over the lives of the people living in those development zones. When the County Commissioner warns people against swimming, he is participating in a theatre of the absurd. He knows, or he should know, that these sites are illegal under safety regulations. Why is the quarry still there? Why was it not sealed years ago?
The geography of the Kudho incident is telling. Being near schools means these quarries are the only “recreational” spaces available to children in the neighbourhood. We do not build parks. We do not build public pools. We build quarries and then act surprised when children play in them. It is a cynical cycle. The police “confirm” the circumstances, the bodies are “retrieved,” and the families are left to bury their future.
Consider the Kabete incident from last year. Two pupils, a boy and a girl, drowned on Mazingira Day. They had been out planting trees. Think about the irony of that. They were participating in a state-sanctioned environmental activity, only to be killed by a state-sanctioned environmental failure. The girl started to sink, and the boy tried to save her. Same story. Same ending. Peter Kamotho, the Kabete Sub-County Police Commander, gave the same type of hollow statement we heard in Kisumu. The language of the state is standardised. It is designed to sound authoritative while saying absolutely nothing about who is actually going to jail for the negligence.
If you look at the broader political landscape, this local neglect is a symptom of a much larger malaise. The government is currently obsessed with the high-level optics of legacy and power. While local administrators are failing to fence off drowning hazards, the national leadership is deep into The Strategic Playbook Behind President William Ruto’s 2027 Re-election Campaign. There is a massive disconnect between the strategic psyops of the political class and the physical safety of the “hustlers” they claim to represent. The re-election machine is well-oiled; the machinery for regulating quarry safety is non-existent.
We are told that the police are “investigating the circumstances.” What is there to investigate? The circumstance is a deep hole filled with water. The circumstance is a lack of a fence. The circumstance is a contractor who took the profit and left the risk behind. If the police wanted to do their jobs, they would start with the land registry. Find out who owns the plot. Find out which company had the license to extract materials from that site. Arrest the directors. That would be an investigation. Taking bodies to a mortuary is just logistics.
The “swimming fun day” tragedy in Kamulu is another entry in this grim ledger. Every time this happens, the headlines are the same. “Fear as brothers drown.” “Gloom as pupils die.” The media uses words that evoke emotion but avoid naming the crime. Drowning is the cause of death, but the cause of the drowning is industrial manslaughter. When a child dies because a private company or a government agency left a hazard in a public space, that is not an accident. It is a killing.
The psychological impact on the family in Kisumu is unimaginable. To lose four children in a single afternoon is to have your entire lineage wiped out in the time it takes for a lung to fill with water. The eldest was 15. He was likely the one the family looked to for support in the coming years. The youngest was 8. Just a baby. They died in an abandoned pit because the “investigations” from previous deaths never resulted in a single contractor being held liable.
Why does the Kenyan state find it so difficult to enforce restoration bonds? When a company gets a license to mine or quarry, they are supposed to pay a bond that the government can use to fix the land if the company fails to do so. Where is that money? Is it sitting in an account? Has it been “reallocated” to more important things like foreign travel or “strategic” campaign funds? These are the questions the residents of Kisumu should be asking. The County Commissioner should not be giving warnings; he should be giving names of the people who are being charged with negligence.
There is a particular kind of cruelty in how we handle these deaths. We wait for the bodies to float. We call the “security agencies” to come and spearhead the retrieval. It is all very formal. We treat the retrieval of dead children like a routine administrative task. Then we take them to the hospital mortuary “to await post-mortems.” We already know how they died. They died because they couldn’t breathe. The post-mortem is just another bill for the family to pay before they can take their children home to bury them.
The residents are cautioned against swimming. This is the ultimate gaslighting. It assumes that an 8-year-old child has the same risk assessment capabilities as a civil engineer. It assumes that “unprotected water sites” are just a natural part of the landscape like a river or a lake. They are not. They are man-made hazards. A river has a bank that slopes. A quarry is often a sheer drop into deep, cold water. Once you slip, there is no getting out. The mud at the bottom acts like a vacuum. The more the boys fought to save each other, the more the silt probably dragged them down. It is a terrifying way to die.
We see this pattern of “open grave” development across the country. In Kiambu, in Machakos, in Kisumu. The construction of our roads is paved with the lives of children who fall into the holes we leave behind. We are building a “vibrant” economy on a foundation of literal pits. The irony of the Mazingira Day tragedy in Kabete should have been a turning point. It wasn’t. We just waited for the next Sunday in Kisumu for the next set of brothers to die.
The police statements are always the same because the script works. It pacifies the public. It suggests that “something is being done.” But nothing is ever done. If something were being done, the quarry in Kudho would have been filled years ago. The quarry in Kabete would have been fenced. The “investigation” is a tool of delay. By the time the report is finished, the news cycle has moved on to the next scandal, the next political rally, or the next “strategic playbook” for the 2027 elections.
The families of these four boys will receive some “poles” from local politicians. There might even be a small donation towards the funeral costs. This is the standard procedure for managing tragedy in Kenya. It is cheaper to pay for a funeral than to enforce the law. A coffin costs a few thousand shillings. Fencing a five-acre quarry costs millions. The math is simple, and it is heartless.
We have to stop looking at these drownings as isolated incidents. They are a trend. They are a symptom of a government that has outsourced its responsibility to the private sector and then failed to supervise that sector. When a developer abandons a site, they are leaving behind a debt to the community. In Kisumu, that debt was paid in the lives of four brothers.
The image of a hand emerging from the water is a haunting file photo used by the press, but for the people of Kudho, it isn’t a file photo. It is what they saw on Sunday evening. They saw the end of a family. They saw the four boys who used to walk to school together being pulled out of the water, one after the other. The youngest first, or maybe the eldest who tried to save them all. It doesn’t matter. They are all the same in the mortuary.
We are told to wait for the post-mortems. We are told to wait for the police report. We are told to stay away from the water. We are never told who is going to be held accountable. We are never told when the quarry will be filled. We are never told why the lives of four “hustler” children are worth less than the cost of a few truckloads of dirt.
The investigation into the Kisumu drowning will likely find that the boys “entered the water voluntarily.” That will be the legal loophole. If they entered voluntarily, then the owner of the land isn’t liable. That is the cynical logic of our legal system. It ignores the fact that a child cannot give informed consent to enter a death trap. It ignores the fact that an “unprotected site” is an invitation to disaster.
Kisumu County Commissioner Benson Leparmorijo says the boys ranged in age from 8 to 15. At 15, you are almost a man. You are old enough to understand danger, but you are also old enough to feel the absolute necessity of saving your younger brother. That is the tragedy within the tragedy. The very bond that makes a family strong is what killed them. They stayed together until the very end, at the bottom of a hole that shouldn’t have been there.
The silence from the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Mining is deafening. They are the ones who issue the licenses. They are the ones who are supposed to ensure that when the stones are gone, the land is returned to a safe state. Instead, they remain silent, letting the local police handle the “investigation.” It is a grand game of passing the buck while the bodies pile up.
Next week, there will be another story. Maybe not four brothers. Maybe just one child. Maybe in a different county. The details will change, but the core of the story will remain the same. A hole was left open. A child went in. The state said “be careful.” The contractor stayed rich. The family stayed broken. This is the infrastructure of death that we have built for ourselves, and as long as “investigations” are the only response, the water will keep taking our children. The quarry stays open. The investigation stays open. The graves stay open.