Date: 2016-12-18

The Kwara Government has clarified that the salary crisis affecting local government councils in the state will be resolved within the shortest possible time.

Dr Muideen Akorede, the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Communications to Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed, made the clarification in a statement issued in Ilorin on Friday.

He was reacting to a report which said that the state government would offset all the backlog of salary and pension arrears due to the local government workers within the first quarter of 2017.

Akorede, in the statement, said the projected savings from the biometric verification exercise, ongoing IGR reforms, expected inflows from the Federal Government in form of refunds as well as anticipated improvement in federal allocation form the basis of government's optimism that the arrears would be cleared soon.

According to him, the state government in its determination to ensure that the salary crisis was resolved had at different times provided augmentation to the local councils to assist them in meeting their monthly salary and pension obligations.

He added that the government recently released N1billion to the councils as their share of the N5billion received by the state from the Federal Government in respect of the London and Paris Club loan refunds for payment of November 2016 salaries and pensions.

The state government, he further said, released N892.4million for the payment of outstanding salary arrears of staff of tertiary institutions in the state. The governor's aide also clarified that the infrastructure deficit of the state was N225billion and not N8billion as published in the report.

He stressed that the government had devised a funding window known as the Kwara Infrastructure Development Fund and designed to pool funds to finance capital projects in a bid to bridge the state's infrastructural gap.