Azimio leader Raila Odinga on Thursday gave tips to President William Ruto on how to resuscitate Kenya's ailing economy and lower the cost of living ahead of the Head of State's Nation Address.
While addressing university students at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Foundation in Nairobi, Raila quipped that the best way to fix Kenya's economy was not to increase taxes but rather tame corruption in government.
The former Prime Minister gave an example of the strategies the grand coalition government employed which included taming corruption and conducting lifestyle audits.
''Once we subjected all these procurement officers to a lifestyle audit and sacked some of them, the government started procuring competitively, prices became less, so the government was able to get more and that is how we succeeded,'' he noted.
The former Prime Minister also gave the example of when the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government came into power in 2002 when the economy was collapsing. According to Raila, the government was only collecting Ksh200 billion at the time.
Raila revealed that at the time, all ministries had procurement officers who were seconded by the Treasury, however, per Raila's account, the accountants had developed a tendency of registering up to 3 companies to award themselves government tenders.
The opposition leader recalled how the officers swindled the government by supplying goods and services to state agencies at inflated prices.
He added that whenever Former President Kibaki's success is mentioned, Kenyans should attribute that to the NARC government's ability to weed out corruption.
''These things are not going to get better because these people are actually messing up, they don't know how to run a competitive economy,'' Raila stated.
The former Prime minister went on to criticize the government over what he termed as civil servants who were not qualified for their jobs and who didn't have a grab on matters ailing the economy.
''We told these people several times that they are in a hole and they should not continue to dig but they didn't understand,'' the Azimio leader stated.
Raila Odinga consequently emphasized that adding taxes was not the best way to address the cost of living saying that people would eventually resist.
Raila was speaking to University student leaders drawn from Kenyan universities who filled him in on the various issues affecting them.
