What You're Paid Is Either Everyone's Business or No One's: Lagos and Prague on Salary

🇳🇬 Nigeria · 🇨🇿 Czech Republic

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Until June 1, 2025, it was standard practice at many Czech employers to write a confidentiality clause into your contract explicitly forbidding you from telling a colleague what you earned — a taboo so entrenched that even now, only a handful of companies, mostly in tech, let employees compare notes freely. In Lagos, meanwhile, asking a candidate to produce evidence of their previous salary before negotiating a new one is so normal that it barely registers as invasive. Two very different silences and disclosures, both defended as simply how business is done.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇬 Nigeria

🇨🇿 Czech Republic

Nigeria: Negotiation Is a Skill, Not a Faux Pas

Nigerian workplace culture treats salary negotiation as an expected, almost respected exercise — not something to be embarrassed about or to approach timidly. Research from the University of Edinburgh Business School examining Lagos's key industries found employees actively negotiating "i-deals" — individualized employment arrangements — with real success, particularly where their skills are scarce. According to a KPMG Nigeria survey of 715 organisations, 69% now support some form of salary transparency, and over half of surveyed employees said they believed their company's performance management was fairer specifically because of a transparent pay culture. That said, "transparency" in the Nigerian context rarely means open pay bands for all; DearHRMagazine notes that a gradual, tiered approach — publishing ranges rather than fixed figures — is emerging as the more realistic middle ground, preserving negotiating room while giving job seekers a starting point.

The negotiation dynamic has its own local texture that catches newcomers off guard: employers routinely ask candidates to provide evidence of their prior salary as a baseline for the new offer. This isn't viewed locally as invasive — it's simply how the opening position gets set. Regional pay gaps also matter more than in many countries: Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt command real premiums over the rest of the country, driven by cost of living and the concentration of multinational employers competing for the same talent pool.

Czech Republic: The Law Changed Overnight, the Culture Hasn't Caught Up

Few countries have flipped their salary-disclosure norms as abruptly as the Czech Republic. Until June 1, 2025, Czech corporate culture operated on the principle — as expats.cz put it — that "it's better for employees to be in the dark," not just about pay but about company finances generally. Confidentiality clauses barring salary discussion were routine, and Ekonom magazine's analysis found only a small cluster of mostly tech-sector firms where colleagues actually knew what one another earned. That changed with a law making such clauses unenforceable and imposing fines up to CZK 400,000 for employers who try to enforce salary secrecy anyway.

The bigger shift is still arriving: the EU Pay Transparency Directive takes effect in Czechia from June 2026, requiring employers to publish average salaries and pay ranges, disclose expected pay to candidates before negotiations even start, and justify any gender pay gap exceeding 5%. Czech employers, per CMS Law and reporting from expats.cz, have been notably resistant, citing administrative burden — and a 2025 Ministry of Labour survey found only 15% of Czech companies currently monitor pay differences across comparable roles at all. The legal architecture for transparency now exists; the cultural habit of secrecy is going to outlast it for a while.

The Reckoning

The irony sits in the direction each country is moving. Nigeria has no comprehensive legal transparency mandate, yet a majority of surveyed organisations already voluntarily support some disclosure, treating it as a fairness and retention tool in a competitive hiring market. The Czech Republic has just been handed one of the most aggressive transparency mandates in Europe, yet its underlying corporate instinct — inherited from decades of treating financial information as need-to-know — is still catching up to what the law now requires.

Hofstede Insights scores the Czech Republic at 57 on power distance and 70 on individualism, a moderately hierarchical but self-reliant culture where people are expected to look after their own interests — which makes the historical secrecy around pay somewhat counterintuitive, since individualist cultures more typically favor open comparison. Nigeria's negotiation culture, by contrast, reflects a workplace where hustle and advocacy for oneself are simply part of how business gets done, transparency laws or not.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone asked point-blank why Nigerian employers request proof of a candidate's past salary before negotiating; the explanation offered was unsentimental: HR teams are incentivized to hire capable people for as little as possible, and a documented salary history is simply the most efficient anchor for that negotiation.

expats.cz — A report on Czechia's pay transparency reform noted that even after the June 2025 law took effect, the deeper habit persisted: most Czech employees still don't know what their coworkers earn, because the legal right to discuss pay hasn't yet translated into an actual workplace norm of doing so.

Quora — A contributor addressing what it's like to work in Nigeria described a "hustle culture" running through the workplace — not as a euphemism for overwork, but as a genuine orientation toward spotting opportunities and negotiating actively for oneself, which they said surprised newcomers used to more passive salary-review cycles elsewhere.

expats.cz — Coverage of the incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive noted that Czech employers were lobbying against the administrative burden of the new rules right up to their rollout, a resistance the piece attributed less to secrecy about numbers and more to a longer corporate habit of minimizing disclosure of internal information generally.

Quora — Someone evaluating a Lagos job offer around $2,500 a month asked for a reality check on whether the figure was competitive; the most useful responses didn't just cite a number back but walked through how to actually counter with a higher figure, treating the initial offer as a starting position rather than a final one — a framing several respondents said was simply expected practice.

Conclusion

If you're negotiating a Lagos offer, come prepared to advocate for yourself explicitly and expect that same directness from the other side — timidity isn't rewarded here, and neither is taking the first number. If you're negotiating in Prague, know that the legal right to ask "what's the range?" now exists, but don't expect your new Czech colleagues to volunteer their own numbers unprompted — the culture is still catching its breath.

My honest read: in Nigeria, ask for more, because everyone assumes you will. In Czechia, ask for the range, because you're now legally entitled to it — but don't mistake the new law for a new culture just yet.