A pain in the wallet focuses the mind. To Kenyans, the Anglo Leasing scandal feels like a very personal affront

A few days ago, a journalist friend found himself interviewing Kamlesh Pattni live on Kenyan television. Pattni, for those not entirely au fait with Kenyan politics, is the Asian businessman credited with dreaming up Goldenberg, a scam that allowed top members of the former president Daniel arap Moi's regime to steal billions of shillings in state funds in the early 1990s.

Pattni has always presented himself as a man whose sole interest was boosting the Kenyan economy. Sleek and bumptious, he proved as slippery as an eel: no surprise there. What my friend wasn't prepared for, however, was the sudden rush at the end, as young technicians manning the lights and cameras clustered around Pattni asking for his autograph - one even held out a sleeve to sign.

My friend was flabbergasted. Why should someone whose wheeler-dealing caused an economic slowdown that blighted a generation's hopes be mobbed like a pop star? "It's the glamour of infamy," I suggested. Pattni has, indeed, acquired the shimmer of celebrity, thanks to months of televised testimony he has given as key witness before a government-appointed commission of inquiry into Goldenberg.

But there are probably other reasons for the crew's behaviour. Involving as it did fictitious gold shipments, shady "political" banks and a government export compensation scheme, Goldenberg was a complex scam. The very size of the sums involved - all those zeros - makes it hard to grasp for folk who calculate their lives in hundreds of shillings. Just as women send love letters to jailed serial killers, never making the connection between the man in the cell and his victims, Kenyans struggle to link Goldenberg's actors with the runaway inflation that ensued. Because they do not fully appreciate how they lost out, their rage is muted.

In contrast, it's hard to imagine those implicated in Kenya's most recent scandal - dubbed Anglo Leasing - being asked for their autographs in 13 years' time. The anger triggered by the claims of the exiled anti-corruption chief John Githongo that a cabal of Kenyan ministers planned to use bogus procurement contracts to steal millions of dollars is too acute for any fan base to develop. While it took the education minister George Saitoti, who quit on 13 February, more than a decade to acknowledge that his role in Goldenberg was problematical, it has taken less than a month for Anglo Leasing to trigger two ministerial resignations.

Why the difference? The overriding reason must be that while no Kenyan held any real expectations of improvement of the Moi regime in its closing years, President Mwai Kibaki was elected promising corruption would be a thing of the past. Euphoric, relieved, jubilating, Kenyans actually believed him. No one likes to be made to look a fool.

Another explanation for the far less forgiving mood may be that, while few understood the mechanics of Goldenberg, Anglo Leasing used a trick every businessman in Nairobi has fallen victim to, whether ordering A4 paper for his photocopier or having his car's tyres changed. You ask your manager to order something. He strikes a deal with a supplier, who presents a vastly inflated bill. You pay up and the two split the difference. It's so easy, Kenyans almost feel their intelligence is being insulted.

Finally, there is a sense that in Anglo Leasing the government of today has broken a new social contract while the ink was still drying. This is where taxes come in. When I lived in Zaire in the mid-1990s, no one I knew paid tax. When I moved to Kenya, the proportion seemed only slightly higher. Given the broken street lights, potholed roads and filthy hospitals, dodgers felt they were virtually taking a moral stand: "The day I start paying taxes is the day the government starts providing basic services."

One of the rare successes of the Kibaki government has been vastly to increase Kenya's tax base. Amnesties have been offered on the understanding that tax evaders come in from the cold. From buying a car to setting up a business, more and more transactions are impossible without a VAT pin number, and once you have that pin number you are on the Kenya Revenue Authority's books for ever. One young woman I met, employed by a charity, confessed with embarrassment that after seven years working this was the first time she had ever been taxed.

There's nothing like a pain in the wallet to focus the mind. Whereas Goldenberg seemed a disgusting but distant parade of greed, Anglo Leasing feels like a very personal, very palpable affront. In the 2002 elections, as Kenyans view it, they signed a deal, only to see their partner renege. While consistently failing to feed a drought-hit population or pave the roads, the government's tax-hungry ministers were, it now seems, planning the mother of all rip-offs. The Kenyan equivalent of "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells" is writing in to the newspapers to rant, and local non-governmental organisations have posited the notion of using a concerted tax strike to push Kibaki to further purges. As a beleaguered president sacrifices minister after minister to save his own scalp, the cry of the belligerent taxpayer from time immemorial echoes across the land: "Hey, I pay your wages!"

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