There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over a certain generation of Nigerians whenever a video like this one makes the rounds. It is the exhaustion of watching, once again, the slow erosion of something that used to be non-negotiable: respect for elders, expressed plainly, through the words we choose to call them.
At the UBA Graduate Management Accelerated Programme, a young graduating participant stood to ask Tony Elumelu, former Group Chairman of the bank, a question. She opened with his first name. He asked her to repeat herself. Then he corrected her, gently but unmistakably, telling her she would address him as Mr Elumelu, T.O.E, or Chairman, and that he did not “subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life.”
The clip has since travelled across X, gathering commentary the way these things do, some of it sympathetic to the young lady, much of it agreeing with Elumelu. I fall firmly in the latter camp, and I do not think that makes me old-fashioned. I think it makes me someone who understands where we come from.
Let us be honest about what happened here. A man who has built one of the continent’s most recognisable financial institutions, who has mentored thousands through platforms like the one that brought this young woman into a room with him in the first place, was addressed by his first name, casually, as though they were mates. That is not a small slip. In our world, in the world most of us were raised in, elders are not first-name terrain. You do not need to be told this. You are supposed to arrive already knowing it, because somebody, somewhere along the way, was meant to have taught you.
TONY ELUI have lived enough places to know that this instinct is not some parochial Nigerian eccentricity that the wider world has outgrown. When I lived in France, nobody addressed a stranger, or anyone outside an established relationship, by their first name. It was Monsieur or Madame, full stop, until familiarity or age made room for something else. In America, students did not call their professors by their given names either. It was Dr this or Professor that, and even in the workplace, it often took an explicit invitation from someone senior before a first name became permissible. I remember waiting a long while before I called my own supervisor, a woman considerably older and more senior than me, by her first name, and only because she asked me to. The West that gets invoked so casually as the excuse for informality actually has its own careful architecture of Mister, Missus, and Miss. Nobody there is walking around addressing their bosses like old classmates either. So the framing of formality as somehow foreign, and casualness as somehow modern, does not hold up to scrutiny anywhere.
What troubles me is not really the young woman. To her credit, once corrected, she absorbed it, adjusted, and pressed on with her question, which takes a certain composure in front of a room and a camera. That resilience is worth acknowledging. What troubles me is the broader drift she is a symptom of, not the cause of, the slow flattening of hierarchy and honorific in the name of relatability, where familiarity is mistaken for confidence and casualness for boldness.
Values exist for a reason. They are not decorative. The instinct to say Mister, Chairman, Ma, or Sir to someone who has earned seniority through age or position is not servility, it is structure, and structure is what allows a society to function with some measure of order and mutual regard. When we discard it in the name of being modern or being seen as unbothered by titles, we are not liberating anyone. We are simply forgetting something that took generations to build.
Tony Elumelu did not owe anyone an apology for wanting to be called by his name and title, correctly. If anything, he did that young woman and everyone watching a favour, delivered publicly, yes, but delivered with restraint. Home training is not something you are meant to receive live on stage in your twenties. It is meant to arrive long before you find yourself standing in front of a chairman.
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