I will be upfront about where I stand on this I don't think publishing everyone's salary online is a good idea, and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the problems it creates will far outweigh whatever benefits that people imagine it would bring.
Let's do this argument for it first, because it does have a surface level logic, the idea is that if everyones earnings are visible, it becomes easier to spot the person living a lifestyle that their declared income cannot explain,the civil servant driving three cars and building a house every year on a salary that should not cover rent, the government official whose account somehow multiplies during their tenure, transparency, the argument goes, would expose these people, and in a country where corruption has become almost structural, that sounds appealing.
But here is where it falls apart.
The people this policy is supposedly designed to catch are the exact people who would find a way around it, corruption is not unsophisticated, the person diverting public funds doesn't keep it in their own name, It is in their cousin's name, their wife is business, their shell company, their property portfolio registered under something untraceable, publishing salaries publicly doesn't touch any of that, What it does instead is expose ordinary, hardworking people who have done nothing wrong and create a fresh set of problems for them.
Think about what public salary information actually does on a personal level, It turns every workplace into a minefield, the moment people know what their colleagues earn, something shifts, the person earning less starts to feel diminished, not because their salary was wrong but because comparison does something to the human mind that is very hard to reason your way out of, resentment builds quietly, team dynamics change, the person earning more becomes a target not necessarily for anything malicious, but for assumptions, for requests, for a different kind of social pressure that they didn't sign up for.
And outside the workplace it gets worse. If your salary is publicly visible, everyone knows what you have, your extended family knows, that uncle who only calls when he needs something now has a number to anchor his expectations to, the friend who never quite manages their own finances now knows exactly what to ask for and how to frame it, there is a particular Nigerian reality to this that people in other contexts might not fully appreciate money information in the wrong hands doesn't just create awkwardness, it creates obligation, conflict, and sometimes genuine danger.
There is also the safety dimension that people gloss over too quickly,
publishing earnings publicly tells criminals exactly who is worth targeting,it is not a stretch, It is a straightforward consequence of making financial information accessible to everyone including people with bad intentions.
For employers, the chaos would be significant too, salary structures exist partly because of confidentiality, the moment everything is public, every negotiation becomes a public argument, every disparity some of which have legitimate explanations and some of which don't becomes a flashpoint, companies would spend enormous energy managing the fallout instead of actually running their businesses.
If the real goal is accountability, especially for public officials, there are better and more targeted ways to achieve it, asset declaration, independent auditing, strengthened anti corruption institutions, whistleblower protections these go after the actual problem without sacrificing the privacy of millions of ordinary people who are just trying to earn a living and mind their business.
Publishing everyone's salary to catch a few bad actors is like burning down a building to get rid of one bad tenant.
The logic doesn't hold.
And the people who would suffer most are the ones who were never the problem to begin with.
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