Crime pays. But it costs, too.

Crime pays. And if you doubt this, look at the billions that some Kenyans and their partners have amassed from spectacular heists: Goldenberg, Triton, Anglo-Leasing, Kazi kwa Vijana, cocaine, heroin...the list is spectacularly long.

Crime costs, too. It is painfully apparent when one visits a public hospital's ward and finds patients sleeping two to a bed or even on the floor. It is depressingly apparent when one visits the vast rural bits of this nation and finds children going to school that little more than patches of ground and an office for the headmaster or homes that still use kerosene lamps and no running water. It is shockingly apparent when policemen collect fifty-shilling bribes from traffic offenders.

The peoples of Kenya have been touched by crime in various ways. Many have been victims, even when they did not know it. Take Anglo-Leasing, for example. This catchall name for contracts in the security sector is synonymous with impunity. The contracts were meant to be the magic bullet in turning national security, intelligence and policing into a high-tech fair fight against enemies of Kenya and criminal elements out to make our lives miserable. We would get state-of-the-art communications equipment, a marine "research" vessel, and such like. What we got, instead, is a scandal that keeps morphing every time State officers mention the phrase "Anglo-Leasing."

There may be no direct connection between events, but if it was not for Anglo-Leasing, this blogger challenges anyone o find a better explanation for why terrorists and criminal gangs can murder and maim with impunity without the State stopping them in their tracks. 85 terrorist attacks and hundreds of violent murders and armed robberies have taken place since John Githongo was asked to "go slow" in his "investigation" into the Anglo-Leasing contracts. The men and women who were at the heart of decision-making when it came to the contracts and swindles are waling free among us. Indeed some of their partners are making money simply by setting up companies and suing the Government of Kenya for "breach of contract." (Many non-lawyers are scratching their heads at how a vast criminal enterprise can continue to secure court victories using dubious contracts.)

They say that there is no pleasure without pain. There are those who are swimming in filthy lucre because of the swindles they have pulled over the peoples of Kenya. The other side of the equation are the millions of Kenyans without access to clean drinking water, education facilities (or educationists), at the mercy of bandits and brigands, facing death an disease because vital health services cannot be financed, living a life which was once described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" by Thomas Hobbes. Crime pays. But it costs, too.