Who shares in corporate growth?

Abstract

This paper examines how selected large Nigerian companies distribute corporate income between employees and shareholders. It begins with an auditable case: BUA Foods reported group revenue of ₦1.528 trillion and employee costs of ₦8.719 billion in 2024, placing recorded staff cost at approximately 0.57 per cent of revenue.^[1] Dangote Cement’s 2022 group accounts similarly report ₦45.032 billion in salaries and related staff costs against ₦1.618 trillion in revenue, or approximately 2.78 per cent.^[2] These ratios do not, by themselves, establish exploitation: revenue is not value added; capital intensity differs by sector; and outsourced labour may be recorded outside the employee-cost note. They do, however, raise an important distributive question when read beside dividend payments, ownership structures, weak wage-setting institutions, and workers’ constrained alternatives.

The study combines audited company accounts, corporate disclosures, official labour-market statistics, legislation, and a critical review of an author-assembled exploratory sample of 54 companies across seven countries. Because the underlying workbook and a complete archival company panel are not available with this publication, the cross-country averages and claimed five-decade trajectory are treated as hypotheses requiring replication, not settled estimates. The verifiable evidence supports a narrower but consequential conclusion: in several major Nigerian consumer-goods and cement businesses, payroll employees receive a small share of turnover, cash distributions to shareholders can exceed recorded staff cost, and prevailing disclosure makes the full labour contribution difficult to measure. The paper proposes standardised value-added statements, disclosure of outsourced labour, sectoral collective bargaining, inflation-responsive wage floors, competition and infrastructure reforms, and a cautious framework for evaluating foreign dividend flows.

Keywords: labour share; employee compensation; dividends; Nigeria; corporate governance; value added; informal employment; outsourcing; wage institutions

1. Introduction: a distribution question hidden in plain sight

Annual reports contain a deceptively simple pair of numbers: what a company earns from customers and what it records as the cost of its employees. At BUA Foods, 2024 group revenue was ₦1.528 trillion while wages, salaries, pension costs and other staff expenses totalled ₦8.719 billion.^[1] Recorded employee cost therefore equalled about 0.57 per cent of revenue—roughly ₦5.71 for each ₦1,000 of turnover.

That calculation is striking, but it needs discipline. Turnover is not income available for distribution. A food manufacturer must pay for sugar, flour, energy, transport, financing, depreciation and tax. Nor does an employee-cost note necessarily capture security staff, drivers, distributors, cleaners, casual workers or factory labour supplied by contractors. The ratio is therefore neither a complete labour share nor proof that a firm could transfer the difference to wages without consequence.

The ratio is nevertheless useful as a diagnostic. It asks where labour appears in the accounts, how that position changes over time, and whether a company’s treatment of workers is consistent with its capacity to distribute cash to capital. This paper investigates three questions:

1. How large is recorded employee compensation relative to revenue in selected Nigerian listed firms?
2. In what circumstances do shareholder distributions exceed recorded employee compensation?
3. Which accounting, institutional and structural conditions can explain the observed pattern—and which reforms would make the distribution more transparent and contestable?

The argument is not that every dividend is excessive or every low payroll ratio is evidence of wrongdoing. The argument is that distribution deserves the same scrutiny as growth. A company may expand revenue while the workers whose effort supports that expansion receive a declining share of value added. Conversely, a low staff-cost-to-revenue ratio may reflect automation, imported inputs, a franchise structure or outsourced labour rather than unusually low pay. An academically defensible account must distinguish these possibilities.

2. Methodology and scope

The study uses a descriptive, comparative case-study design. Its primary evidence consists of audited annual reports and official corporate disclosures for selected firms, supplemented by Nigerian legislation and international datasets on employment and labour institutions. Reported values are transcribed from consolidated group accounts where available. Ratios are calculated as follows:

1. Payroll intensity = employee benefits expense ÷ revenue.
2. Dividend intensity = cash dividend paid ÷ revenue for the same reporting period, with proposed dividends identified separately where timing differs.
3. Distribution comparison = cash dividend paid ÷ recorded employee benefits expense.
4. Preferred robustness measure = employee compensation ÷ gross value added, where a comparable value-added statement is available.

Revenue ratios are presented because they are intuitive and widely calculable. They are not treated as a full labour-share measure. In national accounts, labour share normally compares compensation with value added rather than gross sales.^[3][4] Revenue-based comparisons can be distorted by the cost of imported materials, vertical integration, business models, inflation, acquisitions, and sector-specific capital intensity.

The initial investigation assembled reports for 54 listed companies in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Pakistan. It produced preliminary country averages for staff cost as a percentage of revenue. However, no replication workbook, complete company list, sampling rule, or consistent year schedule accompanies this publication. Ethiopia also lacked a mature public securities exchange during most of the alleged comparison period, weakening the description of all observations as “listed-company” evidence. Accordingly, this paper does not use the preliminary country averages to rank national labour regimes. They remain exploratory results to be tested in a future data release.

The historical claim is similarly narrowed. Later annual reports sometimes reproduce five-year summaries, and exchange, company and library archives contain older accounts. But those sources do not yet constitute a balanced annual panel from 1973 to 2024. The paper therefore offers a historically informed interpretation rather than claiming an uninterrupted 50-year statistical series.

This design has five further limitations. First, it privileges surviving large firms and is vulnerable to survivorship bias. Second, published employee costs usually exclude workers employed through contractors. Third, dividend timing differs between cash-flow statements and proposed appropriations. Fourth, naira values across years require deflation and careful treatment of redenomination and exchange-rate shocks. Fifth, descriptive ratios cannot identify causation. They show allocation outcomes; they do not alone prove that ownership, market power or weak labour institutions caused them.

3. What can be established from audited accounts

BUA Foods provides the clearest contemporary example. Its 2024 audited group accounts report ₦1.528 trillion in revenue and ₦8.719 billion in total staff costs. The resulting 0.57 per cent payroll-intensity ratio is exceptionally low in relation to turnover.^[1] The company’s scale and integrated operations matter: large input purchases and distribution arrangements reduce the interpretive value of revenue as a denominator. Yet even after that caution, the figure warrants closer disclosure of direct employment, contractors, average headcount and compensation distribution.

Dangote Cement’s 2022 accounts report ₦1.618 trillion in group revenue and ₦45.032 billion in salaries and related staff costs, giving a payroll-intensity ratio of approximately 2.78 per cent.^[2] The cash-flow statement records ₦337.471 billion in dividends paid during the year—about 20.9 per cent of revenue and roughly 7.5 times recorded staff cost.^[2] This is not the 13.8 per cent figure circulated in the original draft. The audited filing supports the higher ratio, although the comparison remains sensitive to the fact that cash dividends paid in a year may relate to earnings approved from an earlier reporting period.

The South African comparator often invoked in this debate is Tiger Brands. Its 2023 integrated reporting records R37.4 billion in revenue and R3.1 billion distributed as salaries and benefits, equivalent to about 8.29 per cent of revenue.^[5] This is directionally useful but not a controlled comparison with BUA Foods or Dangote Cement. Product mix, manufacturing footprint, pension obligations, outsourcing, taxation, labour law and the location of employees differ. A properly matched analysis would compare several firms in the same subsectors over the same years and report both revenue- and value-added-based ratios.

The audited examples establish a limited claim: some large Nigerian consumer and cement firms record payroll employee costs as a very small share of turnover, and at least one major firm distributed substantially more cash to shareholders than it recorded as employee cost. They do not establish that every Nigerian listed company behaves similarly. Banks, technology companies and labour-intensive services have different cost structures, while loss-making firms may pay no dividend at all.

3.1 New evidence: 2025 salary bands across 34 listed companies

Revenue ratios say little about how pay is distributed among workers. A September 2026 analysis by Feyi Fawehinmi in 1914 Reader fills part of that gap.^[25] Using FY2025 annual reports from the Nigerian Exchange document library, the authors assembled the salary-band tables that listed companies disclose under Nigerian company law for 34 of the 50 companies they began with. After removing overlap between groups and listed subsidiaries, the cohort covers 76,474 employees. Three companies (Airtel Africa, GTCO and Sterling) published no usable bands; eight banks and groups could not separate Nigerian from foreign staff; five more were excluded for internal inconsistencies. The authors released their company, band and financial workbook, which this paper has re-run independently.^[26]

The benchmark is the ₦70,000 statutory monthly minimum, or ₦840,000 a year.^[12] Converted with World Bank household-consumption purchasing-power parities, it buys roughly 220 international dollars a month—above Ghana’s daily-rate equivalent (about 103), level with Kenya’s lowest regional rate, and well below Côte d’Ivoire (about 329), Vietnam (479–689), Indonesia (428–1,065), South Africa (about 725) and Egypt (about 907).^[26][27] The analysis then sets a deliberately modest low-pay line at 1.5 times the minimum: ₦105,000 a month, or ₦1.26 million a year.

Recomputing the workbook reproduces the published headline: at least 11,800 employees in the cohort sit in salary bands that fall entirely below ₦105,000 a month, and up to 17,621 may do so once straddling bands are counted. Dangote Cement employs 17,570 of the 76,474 workers (23 per cent) but accounts for 9,831 of the 11,800 clearly low-paid employees (83 per cent). Up to 65 per cent of its Nigerian parent-company workforce may earn below the threshold, and its typical (median) employee falls in the ₦83,000–₦104,000 monthly band. It is the only manufacturer whose median employee is below the line; other cement producers in the cohort, BUA Cement and HBM Nigeria (formerly Lafarge Africa), report median bands of ₦417,000–₦833,000 and above ₦833,000 respectively.^[25][26]

Affordability is the obvious counterargument, and the data allow it to be tested. Lifting every Dangote Cement employee in a below-threshold band to ₦105,000 would cost at most about ₦3.0 billion a year—roughly 0.28 per cent of the ₦1.07 trillion company profit before tax matched to the same workforce in the dataset.^[26][28] For every other low-paying company examined, the maximum uplift cost is below 3 per cent of profit before tax; only loss-making or cash-constrained firms such as Dangote Sugar, UACN and Conoil present a genuine capacity question.^[25][26]

This evidence strengthens the paper’s central claim in a specific way. It moves from aggregate ratios to the pay of identifiable workers, and it shows that very low pay is concentrated in particular firms rather than being an unavoidable feature of Nigerian manufacturing. Its limitations are those its authors state: formal listed employment is a small part of a labour market in which about 93 per cent of workers are informally employed;^[29] some companies report basic pay and others include allowances; bands are wide; contractors are absent; and pay frequency is sometimes inferred.

4. Dividends, losses, and the danger of selecting only peak years

Dividend comparisons are most persuasive when they cover full cycles. Selecting a prosperous year for shareholder distributions and comparing it with a crisis-year payroll ratio exaggerates persistence. Nigerian firms faced exceptional currency and financing shocks after the naira reforms of 2023. Nigerian Breweries reported a ₦106 billion loss after tax for 2023, with management attributing much of the deterioration to foreign-exchange losses on foreign-currency obligations.^[6][7] Nestlé Nigeria likewise suspended dividends during the 2023–2024 stress period.

These episodes do not invalidate the distribution question. They show that it must be evaluated across both profitable and loss-making years. A credible panel should report ordinary dividends, special dividends, retained earnings, share issuance, debt service, tax, employee compensation and value added for each firm-year. It should also distinguish domestic and foreign beneficial ownership rather than assuming that every payment to shareholders leaves Nigeria.

Ownership remains relevant. Nigerian Breweries reported Heineken-linked ownership of 56.7 per cent in its 2023 investor materials, not the approximately 73 per cent stated in an earlier version of this argument.^[7] Nestlé S.A.’s holding in Nestlé Nigeria has also changed over time; any figure must therefore be dated and drawn from the relevant shareholder analysis.^[8] Foreign ownership can bring capital, technology, standards and export links, while also producing legitimate questions about profit repatriation, transfer pricing and the domestic distribution of value. The evidence does not justify describing all dividends as extraction. It justifies asking whether labour, government and minority investors receive a transparent and defensible share.

5. Why revenue growth need not become wage growth

Several mechanisms can separate corporate growth from employee compensation.

First, market power changes the importance of labour competition. A firm protected by scale, distribution infrastructure, regulation, brand equity or access to scarce inputs may earn rents without competing aggressively for marginal talent. Economic research links declining labour shares in some markets to the rise of high-markup “superstar” firms, although the mechanism and its relevance vary by country and sector.^[9][10]

Second, outsourcing changes both bargaining power and accounting visibility. A company can reduce the employees appearing in its payroll note while purchasing the same labour through service providers. The expense then appears in cost of sales or administrative services. Research on fissured workplaces shows how subcontracting can separate workers from the lead firms that ultimately benefit from their labour, weakening wage-setting power and obscuring responsibility.^[11] Without contractor headcounts and labour-service expenditure, a low reported staff-cost ratio may partly describe accounting boundaries rather than the total labour bill.

Third, labour institutions matter. Nigeria’s formal wage floor has often adjusted slowly relative to inflation. The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Act 2024 raised the statutory monthly minimum to ₦70,000 and shortened the review period, but legal coverage and enforcement operate in an economy where most employment is informal.^[12] ILO modelled estimates place informal employment at a very high share of total Nigerian employment, limiting the reach of firm-level wage rules and conventional collective bargaining.^[13]

Fourth, workers’ outside options shape wage bargaining. Reliable electricity, affordable connectivity, safe transport, education and access to cross-border payment systems affect whether a worker can credibly move to self-employment or an international employer. The World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update and Enterprise Survey evidence document the burden of unreliable power and firms’ reliance on self-generation.^[14][15] The ITU’s affordability data likewise show why broadband cost must be understood relative to income, not only as a nominal tariff.^[16] These constraints do not mechanically determine wages, but they can raise the cost of searching for and sustaining alternative work.

6. The talent-economy counterexample

Nigeria’s technology sector appears to depart from the pattern found in capital-intensive consumer and cement businesses. Firms whose product is software, financial infrastructure or specialised knowledge compete more directly for scarce skills and may offer salaries or equity well above conventional local benchmarks.

Moniepoint is an instructive example. During a 2024 fundraising round that valued the business above US$1 billion, employee shareholders reportedly obtained a liquidity opportunity through a secondary share sale.^[17] The case demonstrates that employee ownership can share enterprise growth with workers. It does not show that equity compensation reaches every employee equally. Option grants are often concentrated by seniority, tenure and role; private-company shares are illiquid; and a successful exit or secondary sale is never guaranteed.

The appropriate lesson is institutional rather than celebratory. Where human capital is central, replacement is costly and external finance imposes global governance norms, companies have stronger reasons to share upside with employees. Policy should make that possibility broader without treating volatile private equity as a substitute for adequate cash wages, pensions and worker protections.

7. Reassessing the five-decade claim

Nigeria’s post-1973 corporate history contains plausible reasons for labour’s bargaining position to have weakened: oil-boom volatility, the 1986 Structural Adjustment Programme, repeated devaluations, industrial decline, trade liberalisation, informalisation and long periods of high inflation. Scholarship on structural adjustment in Africa documents falling real wages and public-sector retrenchment, while Nigerian labour histories describe the institutional contest around wages and unions.^[18][19]

Plausibility is not measurement. An unbalanced collection of surviving-company reports cannot support the statement that “shareholders have captured a rising share every decade for fifty years” unless the sample, missing years, deflators and treatment of delistings are published. A later five-year summary does not reconstruct every intervening firm-year, and changes in accounting standards complicate comparison across decades.

The defensible historical conclusion is therefore conditional: the audited contemporary examples are consistent with a longer institutional story in which labour’s bargaining position weakened, but a continuous 1973–2024 corporate distribution series remains to be built. That future dataset should include failed and delisted firms, identify mergers and name changes, use sector fixed effects, compare medians with revenue-weighted means, and test results using employee compensation as a share of value added.

8. Policy implications

A stronger policy response begins with measurement rather than punishment.

1. Standardise value-added disclosure. The Financial Reporting Council and Nigerian Exchange should require listed firms to publish a comparable value-added statement showing allocations to employees, government, lenders, reinvestment and shareholders. The statement should reconcile directly to audited accounts and report five-year trends.
2. Make outsourced labour visible. Firms should disclose average direct headcount, non-payroll workers regularly deployed in operations, labour-service expenditure, major contractor categories and occupational injury coverage. This would reduce the false impression that recorded payroll captures the entire workforce.
3. Report distribution consistently. Cash dividends, proposed dividends, share buybacks, related-party payments and retained earnings should be presented beside employee compensation and value added. A ratio without its denominator, year and accounting basis should not count as adequate disclosure.
4. Strengthen sectoral bargaining. Nigeria can examine bargaining-council and sectoral-minimum arrangements used in South Africa while adapting them to local enforcement capacity.^[20] Sectoral floors can limit a race to the bottom among firms that otherwise fear being undercut by competitors.
5. Index wage review to economic conditions. The statutory review cycle should respond to inflation and productivity rather than allowing long freezes. Enforcement must include accessible complaints, protection against retaliation and penalties that exceed the gains from non-compliance.
6. Treat infrastructure as labour-market policy. Reliable power and affordable broadband lower the cost of job search, remote work and entrepreneurship. They strengthen workers’ outside options as well as firm productivity.
7. Protect competition. Where market power rather than productive efficiency supports profits, competition enforcement, open access to infrastructure and transparent industrial policy can reduce rents. Wage policy cannot substitute for competitive markets.
8. Use caution with dividend restrictions. Conditioning foreign dividend repatriation directly on wage benchmarks could deter investment, create avoidance incentives and conflict with treaty obligations. A more defensible sequence is disclosure, tax enforcement, transfer-pricing scrutiny, pension compliance, living-wage reporting and incentives for broad-based employee ownership.
9. Encourage inclusive employee ownership. Tax and governance rules can support employee share plans that include lower-paid and contract workers, protect workers from excessive concentration in employer stock, and provide plain-language valuation and liquidity terms.

9. Limitations and research agenda

The paper’s central limitation is the absence of a released, reproducible firm-level workbook for the exploratory 54-company comparison. The next version should publish company identifiers, fiscal years, source pages, currencies, variables, formulas and exclusions. It should include balanced and unbalanced panels; compare simple, median and revenue-weighted results; winsorise extreme observations transparently; and separate banks from non-financial firms because gross earnings are not comparable with manufacturing revenue.

Further research should estimate real compensation per employee, but only where average headcount is consistently disclosed. It should compare direct payroll with contractor expenditure, examine executive compensation separately from median worker pay, and trace beneficial ownership of dividends. Difference-in-differences designs could test discrete policy changes, such as minimum-wage revisions or sectoral bargaining reforms, but only if parallel-trend assumptions and treatment exposure can be defended.

Finally, the research should avoid turning accounting ratios into moral labels. Corporate accounts reveal distribution, not intention. The public-interest task is to make that distribution comparable, explain the institutions that shape it, and give workers, investors and policymakers enough evidence to contest it.

10. Conclusion

The headline claim—that Nigerian companies pay shareholders more than all workers combined—is true for some firm-years, not an established universal rule. Dangote Cement’s audited 2022 accounts provide a clear example: cash dividends paid were approximately 7.5 times recorded salaries and related staff costs.^[2] BUA Foods’ 2024 accounts show recorded staff cost below one per cent of revenue.^[1] Those facts are significant, but they must be interpreted alongside capital intensity, input costs, contractor labour, dividend timing and business cycles.

The broader institutional concern survives that scrutiny. Nigeria combines concentrated corporate power in important sectors with weak wage floors, extensive informality, incomplete labour disclosure and infrastructure that raises the cost of workers’ alternatives. Under those conditions, firms can make individually rational decisions that collectively produce a persistently unequal distribution of corporate value.

The remedy is not to oppose profit or dividends. It is to make labour visible in the accounts, strengthen the institutions through which workers bargain, widen access to productive alternatives, and judge corporate success by more than revenue and shareholder return. Growth is not fully described until we can answer a second question: who shared in it?

Disclosure

The author declares no financial interest in any company discussed. The initial cross-country dataset and historical archive remain works in progress; their preliminary averages are intentionally not presented as verified national estimates in this version.

References

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