The mundane act of cleaning a home has turned into a tragedy that has shaken Elukhogo village. Margret Timina, a 60-year-old matriarch, was found dead in her living room, her life snuffed out by a rogue electrical current while she mopped her floor.

This incident is not an anomaly; it is an indictment of the perilous state of rural electrification. Police found Timina’s body lying next to her mopping bucket, a grim tableau of domestic duty turned deadly. While Kenya Power officials have descended on the scene, the community’s grief is rapidly hardening into anger against what they perceive as systemic negligence and the proliferation of illegal connections.

A pattern of Negligence

Timina’s death is part of a disturbing spike in electrical accidents across the country. In the same 24-hour period, a man in Voi was charred to death while attempting to vandalize a transformer, and a cow in Kisii was killed by a fallen live cable. These disparate events are connected by a single thread: the chaotic and often lethal management of the power grid.

• The Illegal Connection Menace: Officials are quick to blame "quacks" who rig unsafe wiring in rural homes for a quick shilling, turning corrugated iron shacks into death traps.
• Infrastructure Decay: The Kisii incident, where a pole simply fell and left a live wire exposed on a roadside, points to a failure in maintenance that endangers innocent lives and livestock alike.

The Human Cost

For the family of Margret Timina, the technical explanations offer no solace. They have lost a mother and a grandmother to a hazard that should not exist in a modernizing nation. "She was just making her house clean," a neighbour lamented. "Now she is gone because the wires were bad."

As the police move the body to the mortuary and the utility company issues standard statements about "investigations," the villagers of Vihiga are left to wonder who is next.In rural Kenya, it seems, even the simple flip of a switch—or a wet mop on a floor—is a game of Russian roulette.