Lead image for Lamu is too precious to sacrifice for oil.
In 2001, the world recognised Lamu as something irreplaceable, the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa. Its houses are built, fittingly, from coral stone and mangrove timber.
And 25 years on, Kenya has agreed to build a 700,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery on that same fragile shore. Are we being asked to believe these two things can coexist? They cannot, and that’s why we should say so before the first foundation is poured.
In July 2026, Dangote Industries confirmed Lamu as the site of a refinery expected to cost between $17 billion and $20 billion (about Sh2.2 trillion and Sh2.6 trillion), with soil testing and engineering already under way. It would be the largest such plant in East Africa, built to supply Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan and beyond.
The economic case is being made loudly—jobs, energy security, an end to the region’s dependence on imported fuel. The Lamu County Government has given the project a vote of confidence in Lamu’s future.
Consider what is actually there. The waters around Lamu hold coral reefs that support hundreds of fish species, as well as dolphins, sea turtles and even the occasional dugong. Those reefs are a critical breeding ground for the fish that feed and employ coastal families.
The mangroves that give the old town its timber also shield the shoreline from storms and rising seas, and nurse the young fish that stock the reefs. Seagrass beds bind it all together. This is not scenery. It is infrastructure, the kind that has protected this coast for centuries and cannot be rebuilt once it is gone.
Lamu’s mangroves have been retreating for years, and the dredging that came with the Lapsset port project has already been blamed for damage to its coral reefs.
Refineries bring dredging, tankers, effluent, the constant risk of spills and the slow, chronic pollution that industrial ports carry wherever they go. On a reef already bleaching from warming seas, in mangroves already retreating, among fisheries already stressed, the margin for error is not thin. It is gone.