Building Trust: Why Publishing Government Salaries is Ghana’s First Step to Transparency

Radical Transparency in Public Finance: A Public State Career Portal

If Ghana is serious about becoming a high-trust society, the first and most achievable reform is also the most obvious one. The government must create a comprehensive, public, searchable state career website. On it should appear every role in the public service, every job description, and every Cedi of salary and benefits attached to the role. Importantly, this is not about revealing the names of individuals, but rather the structure of compensation – the entire public-sector pay architecture made visible to its owners, the citizens.

This is not an unprecedented idea. High-trust societies around the world already openly publish government roles and salaries online. Examples include: Singapore, United States, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom.

Such a reform is not complicated. The government already possesses all the underlying data. It knows every role, every grade, every allowance, every ministry-level structure, and every benefit schedule. No external permissions or negotiations are required; it is purely a matter of political will. And that is precisely why it becomes the perfect starting point. When a state chooses to reveal what it already knows, it signals to citizens that secrecy is no longer the default operating system.

What Does Radical Pay Transparency Achieve?

The question then arises: what tangible benefits does such radical pay transparency actually achieve? The impact is multifaceted and profound:

1. Puncturing the Fog of Public-Sector Compensation

In every low-trust society, people suspect that the state is distributing benefits in shadowed ways, allowing a rumour economy to thrive due to information scarcity. A fully transparent salary architecture effectively shuts down this rumour economy. When citizens can search for any role, in any ministry, and instantly see what it pays, the political temperature around public employment cools. Public service becomes less about imagined privilege and more about clearly defined obligations and compensation.

2. Establishing a Benchmark for Fairness

Economists have long observed that perceptions of fairness matter as much as absolute incomes. When the compensation structure is opaque, every allegation of unfairness resonates deeply. However, when it is transparent, fairness becomes measurable. Citizens can compare roles, functions, and pay-scales. They can see whether similar responsibilities are compensated similarly across ministries. Such comparisons inherently push the system toward internal consistency, because once discrepancies become visible, they become politically costly to maintain.

3. Reducing Incentives for Internal Patronage

Opacity is the oxygen of patronage. When no one knows how roles are structured or what they pay, managers can more easily justify arbitrary allowances, special grades, or exceptional promotions. A public salary database makes such practices far more difficult. It becomes harder to invent ghost positions or inflate benefit structures. This reform is the administrative equivalent of turning the lights on: the irregularities that once thrived in the dark find themselves exposed.

4. Empowering Citizens to Track Public Payroll Growth and Composition

Ghana’s recurrent-expenditure burden is among the highest in Africa relative to total revenue. A searchable public-service pay database allows journalists, researchers, and civil society organisations to monitor how ministries grow, where hiring clusters occur, and whether wage bills align with stated fiscal targets. While government constantly urges citizens to trust its fiscal discipline, citizens cannot trust what they cannot see. Transparency converts the fiscal architecture into something verifiable and accountable.

5. Restoring the Moral Legitimacy of Taxation

Taxation is fundamentally a trust relationship. Citizens pay because they believe the state uses public resources responsibly. When payroll scandals, such as the 81,000 ghost names on the National Service Authority, emerge, the moral basis of taxation is severely weakened. Publishing the entire salary architecture helps rebuild that moral legitimacy. Citizens can see not only what the state spends on compensation, but also how the structure aligns with national priorities.

6. Signaling a Political Break with the Past

Low-trust societies often stagnate because governments treat information as a private asset rather than a public one. A public-sector career portal announces the opposite philosophy: that information belongs to the citizenry. It is the first visible step toward a culture of transparency, and because it is simple and data-ready, it is the ideal opening gesture. It tells citizens that the state is prepared to place itself under the discipline of visibility, marking a significant shift in governance.

In short, this is not merely a clerical reform; it is a foundational institutional act. It actively reduces suspicion, narrows opportunities for abuse, aligns compensation with fairness, and empowers citizens to become auditors of their own government. Most importantly, it begins the crucial process of rebuilding the trust that Ghana’s political economy desperately needs.

What are we afraid of?

~ Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, Founder, NBOSI