President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto's offices blew up more than Ksh500 million in travel expenses in six months.
According to a report by Business Daily, the two leaders' offices increased both their travel itineraries both domestic and international gobbling up Ksh200 million more in expenses.
In the report released by the Controller of Budget, they spent Ksh527 million in the six months leading to December 2019 as compared to Ksh324.8 million spend in a similar period in 2018.
Overall, the government's spending on trips went up by Ksh1.3 billion to Ksh8.85 billion.
This is despite a vow by the Ministry of Treasury to slash state's spending with a special focus paid on foreign trips.
Treasury was concerned by the increased debt to the budget ratio which had increased to 60 per cent forcing the state to borrow in order to meet some of its annual budgetary obligations.
Broken down, Uhuru and Ruto's offices doubled their foreign trips spending from Ksh53 million to Ksh111 million.
In that period, the president travelled to more than half a dozen countries including Jamaica and Japan (in August), the USA in September, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Russia in October.
Domestically, DP Ruto, for a better part of 2019, crisscrossed the country in what he termed as an official duty pertaining to his office in inspecting development projects.
A section of Jubilee politicians accused the DP of using the trips as campaigning platform for his bid to ascend to the presidency in 2022.
In that period, the two leaders spent Ksh416.5 million on travel, an increase from the previous year's compounded figure of 271.6 million.
