NAIVASHA, Kenya — It was still dark when the call came.

Grace Nyambura, known to her neighbors in Karagita as Mama Chuma, was asleep when she got a call from her daughter. It was around 5 a.m. She told Nyambura something had happened to Chuma, Nyambura’s fifth-born son. She asked her mother to get to Lake Naivasha as quickly as possible.

Nyambura complied. Kamau, her eldest son, fetched her by motorbike and they rode fast through the sleeping town, headed for the lakeshore. What she found that morning four years ago would sear her memory: her son, Samuel Mwangi Kimani — Chuma to those who knew him — 25 years old and a father of two, lay dead on the lakeshore.

“He appeared to be shot in the back, suggesting he was fleeing,” Nyambura tells Mongabay, seated on a worn-out sofa inside her dimly lit living room. “They were running away from the coast guard. They were not facing off.”

The incident occurred in September 2021. Protests over the killing would soon erupt across Karagita settlement. But in recounting the murder of her son, Nyambura doesn’t seem agitated. She appears more haunted by it, not just his death, but also the years leading up to it, as she watched her child struggle to make a living.

Kimani had spent two years fishing and picking up construction gigs in town. Fishing, she said, had always been dangerous.

“They used to get beaten up,” Nyambura says. “They were harassed by coast guard officers.”

Mongabay reached out to the Kenya Coast Guard Service about the incident, but couldn’t confirm the details of the death. The service also didn’t respond to a request for data about encounters between the coast guard and fishers that had resulted in injuries or fatalities.

Priscilla Njeri, widow of Simon Thuku Mbugua, who was allegedly shot by coast guard personnel, at her home in Karagita, Naivasha, Kenya. Image courtesy of Willy Dennis Njiru.

Mongabay was able to access the coast guard’s incident report, which painted a different picture, suggesting its officers opened fire in response to a violent confrontation with illegal fishermen.

Kimani didn’t have a fishing license or a boat. He and other young men often worked on commission for boat owners who provided the gear. After a previous arrest by the coast guard — from which he was only released after intervention by the boat owners — his mother warned him to stay away from the water. He heeded her warning for a while, drifting between construction sites and delivery gigs. But those jobs were irregular and the pay unpredictable. Eventually, the lake, with all its risks, drew him back.

Five months after Kimani was found dead, in February 2022, another family suffered a similar loss. Priscilla Njeri, a mother of four, had just started her morning when a neighbor turned up at her door.

“Your husband has been shot,” the visitor said.

Her husband, Simon Thuku Mbugua, 38, a fisherman and boat owner, had gone to the lakeshore to negotiate the release of his boat, which had been impounded by the coast guard, according to Njeri.

She rushed to Naivasha Sub-County Hospital Mortuary. She remembers the wounds vividly: “He had been shot six times: in the ribs, wrists, legs, and one fatal shot to the heart.”

A postmortem would later confirm massive blood loss and injury to abdominal organs.

The Kenya Coast Guard Service was formed in 2018, meant to secure Kenya’s waters, both its coastal waters and inshore water bodies. It maintains a base on the shores of Lake Naivasha, which was established to enforce fisheries regulations and protect the lake’s ecosystem.

The service’s heavily armed operations and past allegations of excessive force — including the killing of fishermen operating on the lake — have left many living around Navaisha questioning whether such a force belongs in their midst. While some residents praise the Coast Guard for restoring order in a lake teeming with illegal activities, others condemn it for alleged brutality.

Jayne Kihara, the member of parliament from Naivasha, is unequivocal about where she stands.

“To start with, I do not even know why they brought the coast guard to Naivasha,” she tells Mongabay. “This is an inland lake. You are guarding it against who?”

While the coast guard is officially mandated to “arrest and prosecute persons suspected of committing offences in Kenya’s territorial and inland waters,” Kihara says this authority has been misapplied in Lake Naivasha. She says that instead of safeguarding the lake’s fisheries as a public good, the coast guard’s use of lethal force has made fishing a dangerous pursuit.

Addressing the then interior cabinet secretary, Kithure Kindiki, in the Kenyan parliament in 2023, Kihara charged that the coast guard officers guarding the lake “have been killing our youth left, right, and center, and drowning them when they go to look for their livelihood.”

“These children have nothing to eat,” Kihara, now in her 70s, tells Mongabay. “They go fishing, they get shot — even outside the lake. Somebody runs away, and they still shoot him.”

But not everyone agrees. Patrick Sankale, vice chairman of the Karagita landing beach, a beach management association run by local fishermen and businesses, and himself a fisherman, has a different take.

“Fishermen have absolutely no problem with the coast guard,” he says. “On the contrary, the fishermen are proud to have them around.”

Sankale, who also runs an ecotourism outfit and a local shop, says that since the coast guard’s arrival in 2021, genuine, licensed fishermen have prospered. He cites a recent effort by fishermen who restocked the lake with fingerlings worth 700,000 shillings ($5,400) without any government assistance.

“Prior to the coast guard, it was only crooks benefiting. They would harass us with machetes. Now, that has ended,” Sankale says.

On the shootings, he’s more circumspect. “I heard about the killings,” he says, “but I cannot say for sure. I was not there.”

He adds that in some cases, coast guard personnel have also been victims — assaulted by angry mobs of illegal fishermen, sometimes ending up in hospital.

The coast guard started its operations in Lake Navaisha after the state department for fisheries, aquaculture and blue economy flagged declining fish stocks and the presence of a large number of illegal fishers on the lake.

“Illegal fishing has become very rampant in the lake. The number of unlicensed fishermen along the shorelines, and, unfortunately, on [fish] breeding grounds, has increased over the years since the early 2000s and sometimes they net more fish than their licensed counterparts,” a senior official then working for the Nakuru county where Lake Naivasha is located, told Kenya News Agency to explain the decision to call in the Kenya Coast Guard.

Fishing in Kenya’s inland waters requires one to have a valid artisanal inland fisher’s license or be an employee of the owner of a licensed artisanal fishing vessel. The permit costs 500 shillings ($4) per fisherman per year. Licenses are issued to members of beach management units (BMUs), like the one Sankale helps lead, via the county director of fisheries.

Some local officials allege the licenses are cornered by a few and not issued fairly, leading to illegal fishing in the region.

For fishermen Ishmael Ongata and Samuel Karanja, who work for boat owners in Karagita Beach, the coast guard is neither protector nor victim, but predator.

“These people did not come here to help us in any way,” Ongata says. “All they do is violate and harass us.”

The two men speak with Mongabay by the lakeshore, close to where Kimani’s body was found. Ongata describes the coast guard as corrupt, often working in cahoots with boat owners while targeting small-scale fishermen like himself.

“If it is a big boat, they do not care. But if it is a man like me, there is trouble,” he says.

Both say they’ve been arrested and assaulted by the coast guard. Karanja tells of a recent case where a fisherman was so badly beaten that he soiled himself. “They beat him so brutally, even kicking his belly as he lay on the ground,” he says.

“They even kill us,” Ongata adds, pointing out two locations nearby where he says fishermen were shot dead. “We berated them, shouting, ‘See what you have done!’ But they just left.”

Fishermen say they’re often accused of catching juvenile fish, a serious ecological offense. But even when the fish are legal, the harassment continues.

“They demand 10,000 shillings from a catch worth maybe 2,000 shillings,” Karanja says. “If you do not pay, they arrest you.”

Kihara, the MP, tells Mongabay that coast guard officers illegally sell the confiscated fish.

Josiah Odongo, the deputy commissioner of Naivasha, disputes these claims. He chairs the local security and intelligence committee, which brings together all state agencies working on law enforcement within Naivasha – including the coast guard.

“The relationship between the coastguard and the community is very good,” Odongo tells Mongabay. “We have not had any issues.”

He acknowledges the importance of Lake Naivasha to the local economy, but stresses that all resource extraction must comply with environmental laws.

“If somebody wants to engage in illegal fishing, do not expect that person to support any policy that protects the lake,” he says. “We’ve not even had a single case accusing the coast guard of torture in the past year.”

Odongo declines to comment on the 2021 and 2022 incidents, telling Mongabay that he wasn’t serving in the Naivasha government at the time.

Mongabay reviewed the coast guard report dated Sept. 22, 2021, about the encounter in which Kimani was killed. It says officers encountered “armed illegal fishermen” at 4:30 a.m. who refused to stop and instead fled toward Karagita. The report says a group of illegal fishermen, armed with machetes, shouted “choma, choma” (burn, burn) as they advanced. A corporal fired his M4 rifle in response, killing Kimani.

Two machetes were reportedly recovered.

No arrests followed. No prosecutions either.

Soon after his death, Kimani’s widow left and remarried. Njeri, the widow of the other victim, Simon Thuku, still mourns her husband. She now manages what’s left of the family’s fishing business.

“For relatives whose kin have fallen to the bullets from a service that was meant to guard the water bodies, this was unfortunate considering this is human life lost due to fish catch,” Willy Dennis Njiru, a journalist who covered the Kimani killing for local channel TV47, tells Mongabay.

“It could have been executed in a lighter way, but this was rather cruel,” he says.

Despite the sharply contested versions of events surrounding the killings on Lake Naivasha, the fact remains: people were killed. And to date, no one has been held publicly accountable for the deaths.

Kimani’s mother, Nyambura, engaged a lawyer to take up the matter. But communication has since lapsed, and Nyambura, burdened by work and discouraged by the bureaucracy, hasn’t been able to follow up. Her other children, she says, can’t get time off work to attend court hearings. She no longer knows the status of the case.

For Njeri, not pursuing legal action into the killing of her husband was a hard choice. “There is no way you can compete with the state,” she says.

Nyambura says that even the lawyer stopped answering her calls. But that hasn’t ended her search for answers about her son’s death.

“My son was not stealing. And even if he were, there is a proper process,” she says. “Had they spared him, he would have brought up his children. I lost my child. I need justice done.”

Banner image: A boat on lake Naivasha, Kenya. Image courtesy of ISB0210 via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-4.0)

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