Kwara State govern­ment has denied in­sinuation that Sen­ate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, has a hand in the salary crisis rocking the state-owned tertiary institutions.

The government through Senior Special Assistant to the State Gov­ernor, SSA, Dr. Muyideen Akorede, distanced the Senate President from the unpaid salary arrears at the affected institutions.

He insisted that Saraki neither controls nor inter­feres into the management of state government funds nor its institutions.

There have been insinu­ations since the first term of Governor Ahmed that Saraki, who is generally known as his political god­father, has been indirectly controlling the state's fi­nances by arm twisting the governor.

The government on Sunday however blamed its inability to pay subven­tions to the affected tertia­ry institutions on the drop in the monthly federal al­locations to the state from N3.2bn to N1.8b.

The statement further explained that N1.7b of the amount goes for the pay­ment of secondary school teachers, civil servants, pensions and gratuities ev­ery month, stressing that the remainder had there­fore become inadequate to cover the N500m monthly subventions to parastat­als, including 'revenue-generating' tertiary insti­tutions.

According to Akorede, the government was there­fore forced to suspend the payment of subventions to parastatals while ex­pecting tertiary institu­tions and other revenue-generating agencies to pay workers from their inter­nally-generated revenues.