Witches, Wizards, and Awkward Silence: Why Nobody Will Tell You What They Earn
Priya MehtaOctober 7, 2026 6 min read
🇳🇬 Nigeria · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In Nigeria, one piece of advice commonly given to a young professional asking about pay is to keep quiet about it, because disclosing a good salary "could make her an easy target for witches and wizards." In Britain, only 25% of employees feel comfortable discussing pay with their own boss, no witchcraft required. Both countries have built an elaborate culture of silence around the number that determines almost everything else about a job. They have simply arrived at it by completely different roads.
Do's & Don'ts
🇳🇬 Nigeria
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Research market rates independently before a negotiation — job postings typically ask your expectation rather than stating a figure | Expect a posted salary range; be ready to name a number yourself, carefully |
| Negotiate the full package explicitly — housing, utilities, vehicle/driver provision, and medical cover are all genuinely negotiable | Assume a base salary number alone tells you anything useful without factoring in these benefits |
| Keep your own compensation details close, even with trusted colleagues | Discuss a raise or bonus casually in a group setting; it invites both resentment and requests for help |
| Confirm who the structure benefits — ask directly whether housing/utility costs are employer-covered | Assume a quoted figure is net of all these costs; confirm the full structure before accepting |
| Expect extended family obligations to factor into how colleagues perceive a raise, fairly or not | Be surprised by requests for financial help once a higher salary becomes known, even unofficially |
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Push for a salary range before you apply — most workers say it's the single most important job-ad detail | Assume silence on pay in a job listing means there's nothing to negotiate; roughly 41% of applicants didn't know the salary going in either |
| Benchmark using Glassdoor or sector-specific pay data before any negotiation conversation | Expect colleagues to volunteer their own number; only about one in four British workers has shared their salary with a coworker |
| Treat a direct question about your own pay as reasonable, even if it feels culturally awkward to ask | Mistake British discomfort with the topic for an absence of a real pay gap underneath it |
| Watch upcoming pay-transparency legislation — the direction of travel across Europe is toward more disclosure, not less | Assume current UK norms are fixed; EU-adjacent transparency rules are already reshaping expectations |
| Ask HR directly about internal pay bands if a role doesn't post one | Accept the first offer as fixed simply because the posting gave no anchor number to negotiate against |
Nigeria
Nigerian salary secrecy is not simple reticence — it is a rational response to a specific, well-documented set of social risks. Reporting on the phenomenon lists concrete reasons people keep their pay private: fear of being seen as a soft target for constant requests for financial help from extended family and friends, suspicion that disclosing past earnings will be used against them in a future negotiation, and — genuinely, seriously offered as advice — a superstitious concern that a known high earner becomes "an easy target for witches and wizards." Layer onto that a hiring convention where job postings typically ask candidates to name their own salary expectation rather than listing a fixed range, and the entire system quietly pressures applicants toward overstating prior earnings just to avoid naming a number that sounds, in the reporting's own words, "arrogant, shrewd or unrealistic."
For expatriate and senior roles specifically, negotiation shifts from a single number to a full package — forum threads full of detailed guidance show candidates negotiating housing (fully furnished, utilities and generator fuel included), vehicle provision (fuel, driver salary, maintenance, and licence renewal all bundled in), and medical cover as explicitly, individually negotiable line items, often worth more in practice than the base figure itself. Hofstede's research scores Nigeria at 80 on power distance, one of the higher readings globally, which fits a system where pay is rarely discussed peer-to-peer and negotiation instead runs primarily as a private, hierarchical conversation between an individual and the organisation.
United Kingdom
Britain's version of salary secrecy carries none of the supernatural framing, but it is nearly as deeply embedded. A 2022 Glassdoor survey of 2,000 UK full-time employees found only 25% comfortable discussing pay with their own manager and just one in four having ever shared their salary figure with a coworker, even informally. The practical cost shows up on both sides of the hiring process: 41% of workers didn't know the salary for their most recent role before applying, even though 64% name pay as the single most important factor in a job search, and 75% say they're more likely to apply when a listing actually states the number. Glassdoor's own career trends expert put the cultural diagnosis plainly: "salary secrecy is so embedded in British work culture that breaking the mould and being transparent about pay can feel very uncomfortable."
The Morning Brief
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Employers, for their part, have their own reasons to keep quiet — chiefly a reluctance to expose internal pay inequities that a published band would make instantly visible. But the ground is shifting: EU pay-transparency directives are pushing comparable disclosure requirements across the continent, and UK-based legal and HR commentary increasingly frames the British status quo as an outlier under pressure rather than a stable norm. Hofstede's UK score of 89 on individualism, among the highest anywhere, makes the silence somewhat paradoxical — a culture this committed to individual self-reliance might be expected to negotiate loudly and openly, yet pay specifically remains one of the last genuinely taboo subjects in an otherwise fairly direct professional culture.
The Reckoning
The structural difference is this: Nigerian salary secrecy is defensive, built to protect an individual from a web of social and family obligations that a known high income would activate. British salary secrecy is closer to simple discomfort, reinforced by employers who have their own institutional incentive to keep pay bands opaque. Neither country's employees are naturally more "direct" than the other on this one specific topic — both negotiate hard on almost everything else, and both go quiet, for different reasons, exactly when the number itself comes up.
The irony worth sitting with: Nigerian candidates, forced by a no-posted-range hiring convention to actively name and defend a number, often end up more practiced at full-package negotiation — housing, vehicle, medical, all itemised — than their British counterparts, who are statistically more likely to accept whatever number appears first, for lack of any benchmark to negotiate against at all.
The Part the Brochure Left Out
Expat.com (Nigeria forum) — One detailed thread walked a prospective expatriate hire through exactly how a senior offer should be structured, down to the line item: ensure a housing allowance is "fully furnished," confirm whether utilities and generator diesel are employer-covered, and make sure "your car grant includes all refuelling, driver salary, full maintenance and renewal of all licences" — treating these as more consequential than the headline salary number itself.
BellaNaija — Reporting on why Nigerians avoid disclosing pay quoted advice given to one young professional nearly verbatim: don't reveal how much you make, because it "could make her an easy target for witches and wizards" — delivered, notably, as entirely practical risk management rather than a joke.
Blind — In a thread debating whether workplaces should welcome open salary discussion, one commenter was candid about the personal incentive to keep things opaque, estimating they personally earn "20%-100% more than peers due to superior negotiation skills" and arguing that salary secrecy specifically protects strong negotiators like themselves at the expense of transparency for everyone else.
BellaNaija — The same reporting flagged a second, quieter risk Nigerian professionals weigh before disclosing pay: once a higher salary becomes known even informally, colleagues and extended family alike begin treating that person as a default lender, with real social cost attached to declining a request once the number is out.
Conclusion
If you're negotiating a job offer in either country, the practical lesson is the same even though the cultures differ: nobody is going to hand you a benchmark, so bring your own. In Nigeria, that means researching the market independently and negotiating the full package — housing, vehicle, medical — as seriously as the base number. In Britain, it means pushing for a stated range before you apply at all, since the silence there isn't protecting you from witches; it's mostly just protecting the employer's existing pay gaps from scrutiny.
Either way: ask the uncomfortable question before you need the answer, because neither culture is going to volunteer it on your behalf.
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Photo by Felicity Tai via Pexels
Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.