Before I even start to think about some damages that salary transparency is going to cause and do to some shady contractors and politicians, I need to talk about what it will personally do to a lot of people. Because I would like to say the truth that no one really talks about. Because, with what I have seen, a lot of people over here are not keeping their salary hidden to deceive anyone. They are simply doing it to keep the relationship that they are in to survive.
I remember when I was still serving. All the lecturers and professors in my department usually keep their higher salaries hidden, and they never mention it to anyone. But I was with the data analyst of the department one day when I saw the breakdown of their salaries. I even got to know that some professors are paid more than the HOD of that department.
And to my surprise, I now got to understand why some people's salaries stay hidden while some are made known. And what I have gotten is that, when some people's salaries are known, some family members will recalibrate around it. And a lot of people will be doing some math around that person's salaries just to have a share. And some people will start relating with that person properly because the way they see money around here goes beyond financial. It is also the way they relate with you. It will determine how important someone is, and how they address that person, and some will believe that they are entitled to that money. It can be crazy, I know!
And that even has nothing to do with greed. Because knowing the amount someone earns as salary will become a leverage that people have over that person, especially in an environment where almost everyone is competing for survival. Letting known the amount people earn as salaries would not just expose a local government chairman who earns a million naira but lives like he has five million naira. It would also expose the quite civil servant in Oyo or Kano managing six dependent salaries that look okay until the breakdown is done against the present cost of living here. And that is how those two individuals will be ready in a very different way by those around them, even though they never asked for the public reading.
I genuinely understand the corruption argument because it is very real. There should be an absolute question raised if the lifestyle of a civil servant is visibly disconnected from their public earnings. But I am sure that we already have a rule toward that, and we also have EFCC, the anti-corruption agency. But the issue is that we do not know how much these people earn. The real problem is that the agencies that have access to those numbers always decide to look away by not doing what is right and what they are there for.
If everyone's salaries are being made public. I am sure that it can never stop all these corrupt institutions. It can't fix them. What it will only do is that that last private space most ordinary people have, it will remove it while those "corrupt" institutions will continue to as the way they are or even more broken.
Thank you for reading.
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