{"id":14,"date":"2026-11-05T12:36:21","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T12:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoracle.org\/blog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2026-11-05T12:36:21","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T12:36:21","slug":"sand-the-unseen-calamity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/policyoracle.org\/blog\/sand-the-unseen-calamity\/","title":{"rendered":"Sand, the Unseen Calamity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Musyoki Kamongo<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and into the early 80s, villages across Ukambani drew their water from the rivers. When the rains had long gone and the channels ran dry, women scooped shallow pits, mivuko<\/em>, into the riverbed and waited for water to seep in. The sand held enough to carry a village to the next rains. Nobody wanted it for anything else. Houses were built of mud and brick, and the riverbeds lay deep with sand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That world is ending, and few people in Nairobi have noticed. Kenya’s building boom, its towers, roads and estates, runs on concrete, and concrete runs on sand. We are consuming it faster than nature can replace it. For every new tower in Nairobi, a river in Ukambani is scooped to the bedrock. In 2022 the ENACT organised crime project counted up to 500 overloaded ten-tonne tippers leaving Machakos in a single day, before counting the lorries that move at night. Ukambani carries the heaviest burden because it has the rivers, and it sits next door to the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the lorries carry away is water. Sand is the reservoir of a seasonal river: it soaks up the rain and releases it slowly through the dry months. Strip it out and the riverbed can no longer hold anything. Water tables fall, banks collapse and riverine vegetation dies. When the riverbed is exhausted, harvesters move on to dig sand out of farmland, leaving fields that will not grow a crop. In Mwingi, The Star reported in June, women now walk further for water than they once did, and what they find is often salty or fouled by the lorries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not only a Kenyan problem. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that the world extracts about 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel every year, making sand the most exploited natural resource after water. More than half of humanity lives in towns and cities, and every new city is built of concrete, glass and asphalt, all of them made from sand. Singapore, which ran out of local sources long ago, has been the world’s largest importer for two decades, bringing in some 517 million tonnes. Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia have since restricted exports to it. Governments everywhere have been slow to treat sand as what it is: a finite and strategic resource.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At home, the trade has turned violent. The money is quick, and in a region where poverty runs deep and the rains are unreliable, a lorry of sand pays faster than a season of farming. Landowners sell, young men load, and cartels with money and political connections control the road to market. ENACT found state officers who, for a fee, protect the cartels. Residents who resist have torched lorries. People have died in collapsing pits and in clashes. In February, a fight over sand between two villages in Mwingi left one person dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The law is not missing. NEMA issued National Sand Harvesting Guidelines in 2007. The Sand Harvesting Regulations, 2024 now require an environmental impact assessment licence before any sand is removed for sale, a permit for every lorry, transport only between 6am and 6pm, and a depth limit of one and a half metres on farms. All three Ukambani counties have their own laws: Machakos since 2014, Makueni since 2015 and Kitui since March 2024, when it barred lorries from entering rivers and moved sales to designated yards. In December 2017 the Ministry of Mining banned sand harvesting and quarrying in six counties, Makueni, Kitui, Kajiado, Embu, Nairobi and Isiolo, after a run of deaths in quarries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is missing is enforcement. In June, NEMA’s county director told The Star that only six sites in the Mwingi region held approved assessments and valid licences, in a region where commercial harvesting is everywhere. The 2017 ban answered deaths in quarries; it said nothing about water. A regulation that lives on paper does not stop a tipper at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three things would change that. The first is evidence: regular surveys of riverbeds and sand stocks, so that counties know which rivers can bear harvesting, which must rest and which need rehabilitation, and license accordingly. The second is community ownership. The people who live beside the rivers must be organised, paid and empowered to police them, and the young men who now load the lorries need other ways to earn. Makueni, which built its own sand authority, shows that this works; ENACT credits it with weeding out the cartels. The third is substitution: Kenya must invest seriously in building methods that use less river sand, from manufactured sand to recycled construction waste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sand in Ukambani’s rivers is not a building material that happens to sit near water. It is the water. Every lorry that leaves a riverbed carries away part of a village’s dry season, and Kenya is running out of time to stop a calamity that moves slowly enough to be ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musyoki Kamongo is a Policy Analyst at Policy Oracle, a regional policy and governance think tank.<\/em> www.policy.co.ke<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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