When Private Fortune Becomes a Public Question: Executive Pay and the Social Responsibility of Wealth

Proshare’s CEO Remuneration in 2026 report places executive compensation within a broader assessment of corporate performance and internal pay distribution. The ten highest-paid CEOs of NGX-listed companies received combined total compensation of N30.04bn in 2025, 42% above N21.17bn in 2024. Across the report’s 113-company pay-ratio sample, the average CEO pay ratio was 29.2x and the median 6.6x, while return on equity among the ten highest-paid CEOs ranged from 202.8% to -36.1%. These figures do not establish misconduct, and the report’s total compensation measure includes dividends arising from share ownership.

Collins Nweke uses this evidence to examine the responsibilities that accompany exceptional private accumulation in a highly unequal economy. His argument supports enterprise and legitimate reward while urging boards, shareholders and policymakers to assess whether executive pay remains connected to performance, productivity, employee participation, local value addition and measurable social contribution.
 
The institutional implication extends beyond moral judgement. Transparent remuneration ratios, credible board explanations, long-term performance measures, employee profit-sharing and independently verified social investment can strengthen corporate legitimacy and social stability without imposing arbitrary pay ceilings. The quality of implementation, disclosure and public accountability will determine whether a new corporate compact expands shared prosperity or becomes another compliance exercise.

There is nothing inherently immoral about wealth. Enterprise deserves encouragement, innovation deserves reward, and those who take risks, build companies, create employment and generate value should not have to apologise for success. Yet extraordinary wealth accumulated within societies of extreme deprivation cannot remain morally private indefinitely. At some point, the scale of private reward becomes a matter of corporate legitimacy, social cohesion and moral responsibility.

That point is brought into sharp relief by Proshare’s report, CEO Remuneration in 2026: Examining Executives’ Compensation Amid Market Shocks. According to the report, the ten highest-paid chief executives of companies listed on Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) received combined total compensation of N30.04bn in 2025. This represented an increase of 42% from N21.17bn in 2024. The increase occurred during a period in which many Nigerian households were contending with rising living costs, declining purchasing power and persistent economic insecurity. It also reflected a wider global pattern. Proshare reports that average global CEO compensation increased by more than 10.5% in 2025, while the average worker received an increase of approximately 0.5%.

The numbers invite scrutiny, not easy outrage. A large compensation package is not, by itself, proof of corporate misconduct or social irresponsibility. Some executives manage complex organisations, make decisions involving billions of naira, preserve thousands of jobs and create substantial value for investors and society. Leadership at that level carries pressure, risk and accountability.

The more important considerations are whether executive rewards bear a defensible relationship to value creation, whether employees share meaningfully in the prosperity they help produce, and whether those who accumulate extraordinary wealth accept a corresponding obligation to the society within which that wealth was made possible.

When Pay and Performance Part Company

One of the strengths of the Proshare report is that it does more than publish a league table of highly paid executives. It compares compensation with corporate performance and internal pay distribution.

Proshare finds no consistent relationship between being the highest paid and producing the best return on equity. Among Nigeria’s ten highest-paid CEOs, return on equity ranged from 202.8% to -36.1%. Some highly rewarded executives delivered impressive results; others received substantial compensation despite less convincing outcomes. When remuneration rises without corresponding improvements in returns, productivity, employment or worker welfare, it begins to resemble entitlement rather than reward.

Proshare introduces two particularly useful measures. The first is “pay efficiency”: the amount of pre-tax profit generated for every naira paid to the chief executive. The second is the “CEO pay ratio”, comparing executive compensation with average employee earnings. Across the 113 listed companies examined, the average CEO pay ratio was 29.2x, while the median was 6.6x. The distance between those figures suggests that extreme disparities are concentrated among a comparatively small group of companies. At the outer limits, the estimated ratios reached 1,027x at Custodian Investment and 649x at GTCO.

These figures should be interpreted cautiously. Proshare’s definition of total compensation includes dividends arising from an executive’s shareholding. Dividends are principally returns to ownership rather than payment for executive labour. Moreover, return on equity is an imperfect metric across companies operating in different sectors and with different capital structures.

The broader picture remains difficult to ignore. Compensation at the top is growing much faster than earnings across the workforce, and executive reward does not always move in tandem with measurable corporate performance.

Wealth Has a Social Genealogy

The popular mythology of wealth creation often presents the successful individual as a solitary figure: the visionary entrepreneur who, through courage, brilliance and hard work, creates prosperity from almost nothing. Individual talent matters. So do discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and risk. But no fortune is entirely self-created.

Businesses depend on public institutions that enforce contracts and protect property. They employ workers educated, however imperfectly, by society. They use roads, ports, communications infrastructure, financial systems and national resources. They depend on consumers whose collective purchasing decisions produce corporate revenue. Some benefit from tax incentives, regulatory concessions, government contracts, import protections or public intervention during periods of crisis. Employees generate productive value. Communities provide social stability and frequently absorb environmental or economic costs that do not appear on corporate balance sheets. Even the most ingenious entrepreneur operates within an ecosystem built and sustained by others.

Extraordinary wealth therefore has a social genealogy. Recognising this does not diminish entrepreneurship. It places it in its proper human context. The social debt of extraordinary wealth is not a legal accusation or a demand that successful people surrender everything they have earned. It is the moral recognition that exceptional private accumulation creates an exceptional responsibility towards the society that made such accumulation possible.

Ubuntu, Njikọta and the Meaning of Prosperity

African philosophy offers a vocabulary through which this responsibility can be understood without descending into hostility towards success. As I pointed out elsewhere in this Proshare column, Ubuntu insists that individual humanity is realised through relationship with others. Njikọta, the Igbo idea of coming together, interconnectedness and collective strength, similarly reminds us that prosperity cannot remain permanently detached from community. Neither philosophy demands uniformity of income. Neither denies excellence, ambition or individual achievement. Their challenge is directed instead at isolation: the belief that one can flourish indefinitely while remaining indifferent to the conditions of the community around oneself.

Ubuntu does not ask successful people to apologise for succeeding; it asks them to enlarge the circle of human possibility. Njikọta asks wealth to strengthen the bonds holding society together rather than widen the distance between those who belong and those who have been economically abandoned. In a society where millions lack adequate food, healthcare, education, housing and productive opportunity, extraordinary wealth cannot be morally neutral. The moral problem is not that some people have much, but that abundance too often carries no voluntarily embraced or publicly structured obligation towards those who have almost nothing.

Beyond Performative Philanthropy

Africa does not lack philanthropic announcements. Wealthy individuals establish foundations, sponsor ceremonies, distribute seasonal gifts, fund scholarships and donate to religious, educational and community institutions. Some of these initiatives save lives and create lasting opportunities. They deserve recognition. But philanthropy should not be judged by the prominence of the donor, the size of the cheque displayed before television cameras or the elegance of a foundation’s annual dinner.

Impact should be judged by measurable change: rising household income; skills that lead to sustainable employment; and improved access to healthcare, decent housing, productive finance or assets capable of changing economic prospects across generations.

There is a fundamental difference between charitable visibility and redistributive impact. Charity may relieve an immediate episode of suffering. Genuine redistribution alters the distribution of capability, opportunity and ownership that reproduces suffering. One addresses a symptom; the other attempts to change the underlying structure.

The super-rich should therefore be encouraged to move beyond discretionary benevolence towards measurable social investment. Foundations and corporate initiatives claiming to reduce poverty should publish clear objectives, administrative costs, beneficiary data and independently verified outcomes. A scholarship may be admirable; an investment that transforms an entire public school system is more consequential. Donating food at Christmas offers immediate relief, while financing irrigation, storage, agricultural extension and access to markets may enable families to feed themselves permanently. The objective should be social investment that makes poverty less reproducible.

What Governments Can and Cannot Do

Moral persuasion alone cannot correct entrenched inequality. Governments have a legitimate role in establishing the minimum obligations that accompany corporate citizenship and extreme wealth. Several international approaches offer useful lessons.

The United Kingdom requires quoted companies with more than 250 UK employees to disclose annually the ratio between CEO remuneration and employee pay at the median, lower quartile and upper quartile, together with an explanation of the resulting disparities.

In the United States, covered public companies must disclose CEO compensation, median employee compensation and the ratio between them. Shareholders also receive a “say on pay”, enabling them to express approval or disapproval of executive compensation arrangements.

The European Union’s Shareholder Rights Directive requires remuneration policies and detailed reports on directors’ pay. It gives shareholders voting rights and requires companies to explain how employee remuneration and working conditions were considered when executive compensation was determined. It also encourages alignment between rewards, long-term performance and corporate sustainability.

South Africa enacted legislation in 2024 requiring public and state-owned companies to disclose average and median employee remuneration, the remuneration of the highest- and lowest-paid employees and the resulting remuneration gap.

India has taken a different approach. Its Companies Act requires qualifying companies to spend at least 2% of average net profits over the preceding three years on corporate social responsibility activities.

None of these models offers a perfect solution. Disclosure can expose an unjustifiable pay gap without narrowing it. Shareholder votes may prove weak where ownership is concentrated or passive. Mandatory corporate social responsibility can deteriorate into a compliance exercise in which money is spent but little changes. Nevertheless, these models demonstrate that executive compensation and social contribution need not remain entirely beyond the reach of public policy.

In Nigeria and similarly unequal developing economies, a balanced framework should begin with transparency rather than an arbitrary salary ceiling. Listed companies and large private corporations should disclose total executive remuneration, median employee compensation and the ratio between them. Where the ratio exceeds a defined threshold, the board should be required to provide a public explanation.

Variable executive compensation should be connected not only to profit and share price, but also to productivity, real wage growth, job creation, workforce development, local value addition, tax compliance and environmental performance. Companies should be encouraged to establish employee profit-sharing and broad-based share-ownership schemes. If workers help create exceptional corporate value, they should participate in the resulting prosperity. Governments could also offer carefully designed tax incentives for independently verified poverty-reduction investments. But such incentives must not become vehicles for tax avoidance. Philanthropy cannot be accepted as a substitute for paying lawful taxes, providing decent employment or avoiding environmental harm. Progressive taxation of high incomes, capital gains and large inheritances should remain part of the conversation.

Yet taxation must be accompanied by transparency and public accountability. Citizens will understandably resist redistributive policies if the resulting revenue disappears into patronage, corruption, administrative extravagance or elite consumption. Government must therefore discharge its own social debt. It cannot demand solidarity from private wealth while public officials convert public resources into private privilege.

A New Corporate Compact

The objective should be neither to punish wealth nor romanticise poverty. Developing economies need entrepreneurs, investors, innovators and capable corporate leaders. They also need societies stable and inclusive enough for enterprise to flourish. Extreme inequality undermines that stability. It weakens trust, restricts social mobility and creates the perception that economic systems are designed to reward those already at the summit while transferring risk and austerity to everyone below.

A new corporate compact should rest on a simple principle. Exceptional reward must be accompanied by shared progress. Boards should assess whether a chief executive increased national and social value alongside shareholder value. That assessment should include decent job creation, real wage growth, stronger domestic suppliers, fair taxation and the company’s effect on its host communities.

Public recognition should similarly change. Governments and business organisations are often quick to celebrate the largest donor or richest entrepreneur. Recognition should increasingly go to the individuals and companies that can demonstrate the greatest measurable improvement in human capability. A national social-impact register could document major corporate and philanthropic interventions, their stated objectives, their costs and their independently verified outcomes. Tax incentives, public honours and procurement advantages could then be tied to demonstrated impact rather than announced generosity. This would transform giving from an exercise in personal discretion and reputation management into a culture of accountable solidarity.

The Responsibility of Abundance

A society cannot legislate Ubuntu into the human heart. It can, however, create institutions that reward solidarity, expose excess and ensure that those who benefit most from the economy contribute proportionately to its continuity. The law should establish the floor of distributive responsibility. Conscience, Ubuntu and Njikọta should inspire society’s most fortunate to rise well above it. There is honour in building a successful company. There is dignity in creating wealth through enterprise and hard work. But the highest expression of success is not the distance one travels from poverty. It is the number of people whose possibilities expand because one succeeded.

Extraordinary wealth brings influence, freedom and power unavailable to most citizens. It also brings a social debt arising not from guilt, but from interdependence. That debt is repaid when employees participate in corporate prosperity; when philanthropy produces measurable human advancement; when taxes are paid rather than artfully avoided; when communities acquire productive assets; and when accumulated wealth becomes a bridge through which others cross into dignity.

A fortune may legally belong to an individual. But the conditions that make a fortune possible are always, in part, social. The ultimate moral test of wealth is therefore not how impressively it is accumulated, displayed or donated. It is whether, after satisfying private abundance, it helps to reduce public deprivation. That is the Ubuntu dividend. That is the promise of Njikọta. And that is the social debt of extraordinary wealth.

About the AUTHOR

Collins NWEKE is an International Trade Consultant & Economic Diplomacy researcher. He was a former Green Councilor at Ostend City Council, Belgium, where he served three consecutive terms until December 2024. A first-generation migrant who transitioned from civil society activism into elected office, he writes frequently on democracy, governance, and Africa–Europe relations. He is the author of the book ‘Economic Diplomacy of the Diaspora’. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the International Association of Research Scholars and Administrators and serves on its Governing Council. A columnist for The Brussels Times, Proshare, and Global Affairs Analyst with a host of media houses, Collins writes from Brussels, Belgium. X: @collinsnweke E: admin@collinsnweke.eu W: www.collinsnweke.eu