Shanta Gold’s Ramula mine now turns on every landowner’s signature, not the ministry’s licence

Latest developments

• 14 November, 14:00 EAT: Shanta Gold is asking families in the Ramula and Mwibona area to choose between moving ancestral graves, with the company paying for exhumation permits and customary rites, or a cash payment per grave for those who refuse. TV47 reported the offer from a recent community meeting. Citing project records, it also reported that the company has verified assets for 980 households in the mining footprint, made compensation offers to 716, paid about 389 and physically resettled 101. The same day, “Ramula Gold Justice” and “Shanta Gold” were trending in Kenya, driven largely by a hashtag campaign (#ReturnOfRamulaLand) calling for the judgment to be respected.

The analysis

The day after Kenya’s Environment and Land Court at Siaya ruled against Shanta Gold, the government told the country that nothing important had changed. “The Court did not issue an order stopping Shanta Gold Kenya Limited’s activities,” Mining Principal Secretary Harry Kimtai said on 30 October. The company’s prospecting licence, PL/2019/0222, “remains valid and in force.”

Both statements are accurate. Neither describes what the judgment actually did. The court did not cancel the licence. What it did was more lasting. It made the next step, a mining licence for the Ramula-Mwibona open pit, depend on the written consent of every registered owner of private land the application covers. In practical terms, the decision over one of Kenya’s most advanced large gold projects has moved away from the ministry in Nairobi and towards hundreds of families in Gem, Siaya County.

What the court ordered

Justice A. E. Dena gave judgment on 29 October in two consolidated cases. One petition was filed by 60 residents of Ramula, Munungo and Uranga sub-locations. The other was brought by Francis Awino, who also challenged the Competition Authority’s approval of the acquisition of Acacia Exploration (Kenya) Limited by a Shanta subsidiary and the environmental hearings held in April 2025. According to the orders as reported by Citizen Digital, TV47 and Siaya Today, the court:

• declared that the express consent of registered landowners, required by section 37(1) of the Mining Act 2016, is a condition that must be met before prospecting or mining rights over private land can be granted or used;
• barred Shanta Gold from entering, drilling, clearing, digging or doing any other work on private parcels in the three sub-locations where that consent has not been obtained;
• ordered that no mining licence be granted on application No. 0200 for the Ramula project until the ministry has documentary evidence of consent from the registered owner of every affected private parcel;
• found that the licensing process for the 2019 prospecting licence did not comply with section 34 of the Act;
• ordered that objections to the application, including those lodged after a Kenya Gazette notice of 1 August 2025, be considered afresh, and that no earlier recommendation be acted on before then;
• made a benefit-sharing framework agreement, under Article 69 of the Constitution and section 109 of the Mining Act, a condition for any mining licence;
• barred any resettlement or relocation of residents outside the procedure in the Mining Act; and
• gave the respondents six months to report back on compliance.

Shanta’s lawyer, Angeline Oloo, said in remarks carried by KBC that the ruling restricts work only on private land where consent is missing and does not halt the wider project. That is also correct. But the Ramula pit is not a side issue. The company describes the West Kenya Gold Project as one operation: an open pit at Ramula-Mwibona plus underground mines at Isulu-Bushiangala in Kakamega, feeding a single 915,000-tonne-a-year processing plant. Reported resources are about 1.72 million ounces. The mining ministry’s own court affidavit says the Ramula mining licence application was filed on 5 June 2024 and covers 15.39 square kilometres across Siaya and Vihiga counties.

Who holds the power now

Until this judgment, the order of events favoured the investor. The ministry issued the prospecting licence and handled the mining application. NEMA ran the environmental process. The company sought landowners as it went. In court, the ministry insisted that every licence and approval complied with the Mining Act, the environmental law and the Constitution, and said the application already included landowner consents.

The judgment reverses that order for private land. Consent is now a precondition the ministry must check against documents, parcel by parcel, before it can act. That gives each registered owner in the application area leverage they did not clearly have before. A single holdout cannot be overruled by a ministry statement. The holdout has to be negotiated with, or the parcel left out of the mine plan.

The county government is a second veto point. In April, Governor James Orengo said Siaya would withhold the “letter of no objection” the company needed until full public participation had taken place. We found no public record that the letter has since been issued. The national government, by contrast, has so far spoken mainly to reassure investors. The PS’s statement presented the ruling as “guidance” and promised to comply with it.

Who bears the burden

The cost does not fall on one side of the dispute only. The petitioners told the court that the land holds their homes, farms, burial sites and shrines. They alleged that some consent forms were obtained through pressure, manipulation and, in some cases, forgery. Those are allegations made in their pleadings. The ministry and the company told the court that they had complied with the law.

But Ramula is not united against the mine. In April, six houses were burned and 47 people displaced during anti-mining protests, TV47 reported. Residents who had accepted the company’s compensation offers blamed fellow villagers who opposed their cooperation, and asked the state to protect them. Any process that depends on individual consent will expose people who say yes as much as people who say no. Police and county officials will be under pressure to protect both groups.

The latest figures show how much is still unsettled. If the numbers TV47 attributed to project records are right, fewer than half of the 980 verified households had been paid by mid-November, and about 260 had not yet received an offer. Households are not the same as registered parcels. Some families occupy land they do not hold title to, and some titles cover several households. So these figures do not measure the consent the court requires. They do show that the company’s land programme is still at an early stage, and the grave question is only now being put to families.

The public also has a stake. Kenya’s formal mining sector is small. The Isulu-Bushiangala environmental study alone projected royalties of about $4.3m to $4.7m a year, The Star reported. Under the Mining Act, royalties are split between the national government, the county and the local community. A long delay at Ramula postpones that revenue. A deal pushed through without real consent risks the kind of conflict that has already burned houses in Gem.

What happens next

Three dates and decisions matter.

• The compliance report. The respondents must report to the court by about the end of April 2027. That report will show whether the ministry has started checking consent documents and running the fresh review of objections, or is simply waiting.
• Appeal or compliance. We found no public report of an appeal. If the state or the company appeals, the ruling’s reading of section 37 could reach a higher court and set the rule for private land across Kenya’s mining frontier. If they comply, the benefit-sharing framework and the parcel-by-parcel consent process become the real negotiation.
• Financing. Shanta says its 2026 priorities are completing project finance and moving its resettlement plan forward. For Isulu-Bushiangala, its environmental study says land will be acquired through a voluntary, negotiated process under the International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standard 5, The Star reported. Any lender will have to weigh that kind of promise against a court order that makes voluntariness a legal test, not just a policy aim.

The ministry is right that the licence survives. But a prospecting licence was never going to produce gold. A mining licence will, and after 29 October that depends on whether the people who own the land agree. In Ramula, that is now a matter of signatures, not statements.