On the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, communities opposing a KSh 500 billion nuclear plant are being arrested, shot at, and branded terrorists. Here is what is actually happening, and who these people really are.
On the afternoon of 30 July 2026, plainclothes DCI officers arrested James Lawi Guya, a community organiser, in Bondo. His work has been civic education: sitting with neighbours to explain what a nuclear plant on Lake Victoria could mean for their water, their fish, and their children. He was held for a full day with no Occurrence Book number and no charge sheet, and human rights defenders were blocked from the station. When he was finally produced before the Bondo Court, the accusation waiting for him was “terrorism-related suspicions”.
The timing is hard to read as coincidence. James was arrested one day after his coalition, the Friends of Siaya Anti-Nuclear Plant (FSANP), filed a detailed Access to Information request to the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA), asking for the environmental, seismic, resettlement and public participation records the affected communities have never been shown. He is now one of eighteen people arrested over peaceful opposition to the project. At least one is a child.
Who the state is calling terrorists
It is worth being specific about who these eighteen are, because the labels do not survive contact with the facts. They are a single mother who sells porridge and chapati outside a Bondo school and talks to her customers about the project. They are artisanal gold miners, some barely out of their teens, some in their late forties. They are boda boda riders, jua kali workers, and bar attendants who hear the whole community pass through their day. They are young men working part-time to pay their way to college. One is a Grade 9 learner who worries, in the direct way children do, about whether the lake will stay clean.
These are not foreign agents. They are the people Lake Victoria raised, asking what anyone would ask about a KSh 500 billion facility next door: What happens to the water? Where does the waste go? Who decided? The answer, again and again, has been force.
The “goons” remark and what it reveals
According to FSANP, NuPEA chair Prof. Larry Gumbe described residents at a public forum as “goons invading a peaceful meeting” in a social media post seen by the coalition. The framing does real work. Once citizens exercising a constitutional right are recast as goons, violence against them looks like order being kept and arrest looks like public safety. The word does the softening before the baton does the rest. The people at those forums were fisherfolk, farmers, parents, miners and students asking to be heard. Calling that an invasion says more about the agency than about them.
A pattern of force, not dialogue
The arrests did not begin with James, and the violence did not begin overnight. On 21 May 2026, Sakwa residents marched carrying banners that read, simply, “We Reject,” and were met with police rather than dialogue. The confrontation sharpened in late July. On Friday 24 July, a government sensitisation meeting at Ka’John Trading Centre, attended by NuPEA, KenGen and the Bondo MP, collapsed into chaos, and David Otieno Mboya, an artisanal miner from Lenya, was shot in the leg. By his own account, he was walking home from work and merely passing the venue when police opened fire, though the local police commander denies anyone was shot and says officers fired into the air. The next day, police swept through Ka’John, Lenya and Nango and arrested seventeen people.
Prosecutors pushed to hold the seventeen on possible terrorism-related charges, but the magistrate refused and released them on bail. James, arrested separately on 30 July, was not so lucky. The terrorism-related suspicion the court had refused to entertain against the seventeen was now used to hold him, this time as the sole accused in his own case. He remains in custody as this is written, unable to raise the KES 180,000 bond, and needs regular medication for a health condition his cell cannot accommodate. He is there because he asked questions out loud.
The playbook is not new to Kenya either. The Siaya plant was first proposed for Uyombo village in Kilifi County, and moved only after coastal communities resisted, citing the threat to marine life and the Arabuko-Sokoke reserve. There, too, protesters were assaulted and arrested. One resident reported living in fear after his phone was seized and his communications monitored. The same sequence of surveillance, violence, and arrest has simply travelled west to the lake.
The fight is being waged with the law, not against it
This is not a story of helpless people being crushed. What is striking about Siaya is how deliberately residents are using the tools the Constitution gives them. The Access to Information request filed on 30th July is no slogan: a rigorous, twelve-part demand under Article 35 and the Access to Information Act of 2016 for the full record, from the environmental and seismic studies to the resettlement plans, financing arrangements and transboundary correspondence with Kenya’s lake neighbours. It gives NuPEA twenty-one working days to respond and reserves the community’s right to go to court.
That request now has an official watching brief. The Commission on Administrative Justice, the Office of the Ombudsman, has acknowledged it and reminded NuPEA of its legal duty to respond. This is accountability from below: not a mob, but a coalition building a paper trail the state cannot easily ignore.
Science, and the “political side of it”
There is also the question of why Siaya at all. FSANP points to NuPEA’s own 2023 Strategic Environmental and Social Assessment, which the coalition says flagged the Lake Victoria region on geological grounds: the instability of the East African Rift System, active volcanic hazards, the risk of lake tsunamis. The site was chosen anyway. A senior NuPEA engineer, the coalition reports, acknowledged in March 2026 that the shift was driven by “the political side of it.”
That phrase should sit uncomfortably. The 2,000-megawatt plant, announced by President William Ruto at the 2026 International Conference on Nuclear Energy, would sit on Africa’s largest freshwater lake, a shared inheritance of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and the wider basin that supports more than 200,000 fishing families, none of them consulted and no riparian neighbour notified. A decision of that weight steered by political convenience rather than the agency’s own science is exactly what transparency exists to test.
Greenpeace Africa stands with Siaya
The people of Sakwa are not standing alone. Greenpeace Africa backed the residents from the moment they first said no at the May forum, arguing that a decision of this magnitude cannot be made for a community without it, and pointing to the same uncomfortable fact the residents keep raising: NuPEA’s own 2023 assessment had ruled the Lake Victoria region out on geological grounds, and the project moved there anyway. The Kenya Anti Nuclear Alliance has likewise condemned the July violence and the arrests. What began as one community’s objection has become a test of whether Kenya will build its nuclear programme on consent or on coercion.
Greenpeace Africa’s position is plain: publish the full record, and let the people of Siaya decide. Transparency is not an obstacle to a credible nuclear programme, it is the only honest foundation one could be built on. A government confident in its science and its safeguards would release the documents, not arrest the people asking to see them. Standing with the defenders of Lake Victoria is not opposition to Kenya’s development. It is insistence that development worth its name is done with communities, not to them.
What FSANP is asking for
The coalition’s demands are neither radical nor unreasonable. FSANP is asking for:
● The immediate and unconditional release of James Lawi Guya on humanitarian and medical grounds, and the dropping of the terrorism-related allegations against him and the seventeen others, including the child.
● An end to the use of the police and the courts to intimidate environmental and land defenders.
● Full compliance by NuPEA with the Access to Information Act, and release of the records in languages people actually speak.
● A genuine, community-led consent process, with the community’s answer treated as the deciding factor rather than a formality.
None of this requires anyone to be pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. It asks only that a government treat the people it serves as citizens, not obstacles. Kenya can publish the record and let Siaya decide, or it can keep answering questions with handcuffs. But arresting people for asking what a nuclear plant will do to their lake is not the price of progress. It is the confession of a project that cannot survive the truth.
Sherie Gakii, Communications and Story Manager
