Tony Elumelu, first names and the Nigerian culture of respect

There has been a great deal said on both sides of the recent controversy surrounding Tony O. Elumelu, C.F.R., after he corrected a young professional who addressed him simply as “Tony.”

As is often the case in the age of social media, what was a brief interaction quickly became something much larger: a debate about respect, hierarchy, age, generational change and whether some of Nigeria’s traditional cultural norms still have a place in a modern, increasingly global workplace.

I understand that the young woman and Mr. Elumelu have since met, and I hope that brings the personal dimension of the matter to an end. Anyone bullying or attacking her over what was almost certainly an innocent cultural mistake is completely wrong. There was no great offence committed here, and certainly nothing that warrants the abuse that social media can so easily unleash.

But I also understand Tony Elumelu’s reaction.

Perhaps I have an unusual perspective on this. I am Oyinbo/ bature/ onyeocha, but I was born and raised in Nigeria by Dutch missionary parents. Nigeria – particularly the Middle Belt – shaped me culturally long before I had the language to explain exactly what that meant. Later, I had the privilege of working extremely closely with Tony Elumelu for five years as the inaugural CEO of the Tony Elumelu Foundation.

And in those five years, I would never have considered simply calling him “Tony.”

It just wasn’t done.

This was not because he demanded some elabourate display of deference from those around him. It was simply the cultural context in which we operated. There are relationships in Nigerian society where the use of a first name communicates a familiarity that has to be earned—or, at the very least, invited.

People such as former President Olusegun Obasanjo, or Tony Elumelu’s closest friends and contemporaries, could naturally call him Tony. Interestingly, many of the people who knew him particularly well actually called him “TOE,” from his initials.

The respect also went both ways.

Because I have a doctorate, he often addressed me or introduced me as “Dr Boer.” And I watched him interact over the years with many senior Nigerian and international figures whom he would never have casually addressed by their first names, regardless of how close the relationship was. Whether it was President Obasanjo, Bola Tinubu, President Goodluck Jonathan, Tony Blair, President Barack Obama or Bill Gates, there was an instinctive recognition that how you address someone communicates something about the relationship.

That instinct is deeply Nigerian.

Growing up in Nigeria, respect for age, wisdom, accomplishment and position was sacrosanct. It was embedded in everyday language and behaviour. You greeted elders properly. You acknowledged teachers. You understood that titles mattered—not necessarily because the person possessing the title was inherently more important than you, but because society attached meaning to experience, responsibility and achievement.

There are certainly aspects of hierarchy in Nigerian society that deserve to be challenged. Titles can become excessive. Respect for authority should never mean that authority cannot be questioned. Age does not automatically confer wisdom, and professional status should never excuse arrogance or poor behaviour.

But we should be careful not to throw away something valuable simply because another cultural model has become more globally dominant.
Much of the modern corporate world, particularly in parts of the United States, has moved aggressively towards informality. CEOs introduce themselves by their first names. University students call professors by their first names. Children address adults with little distinction based on age or position. In many contexts this is intended to signal equality, accessibility and openness.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that culture. But neither is it inherently superior.

I spent many years studying and working in the United States, and even served as Vice Chancellor of an American university. Yet I could never bring myself to call senior professors who had taught me when I was a student by their first names. Decades might have passed. My own title was more senior than theirs. It still felt wrong.

The relationship had been established in a particular way, and for me, respecting that relationship mattered.

Even today, I cringe when I hear children call their parents by their first names. And, perhaps revealing my own cultural upbringing, I still find it jarring when someone significantly younger than me, whom I have just met, immediately calls me “Wiebe.”

That does not mean I am offended. Context matters enormously. I have lived and worked across countries and cultures where first-name interaction is completely normal. But being comfortable operating in those environments does not require me to pretend that my Nigerian upbringing disappeared somewhere along the way.

This is where I think the debate around the Elumelu incident becomes more interesting than the incident itself.

Nigeria is changing. Its young professionals are global. They study abroad, work remotely for international companies, consume the same media as their counterparts in London, Toronto, New York and Johannesburg, and increasingly operate within professional cultures that deliberately minimize hierarchy. Many Nigerian companies, particularly in the tech space, themselves have adopted these practices.

That is largely a good thing.

But globalization should not mean cultural homogenization.

There should still be room for distinctly Nigerian ways of showing respect. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Nigeria is precisely its ability to absorb outside influences without completely surrendering its own identity.

And this cuts both ways.

Senior people need to recognize that younger Nigerians may operate with different cultural assumptions. Someone using your first name may be demonstrating neither insolence nor disrespect; she may simply be applying the norms of the professional environment in which she has been trained.

Young professionals, meanwhile, should understand that cultural intelligence involves more than knowing how things are done in Silicon Valley or London. It also means understanding the social codes of Lagos, Kano, Enugu, Jos, or Port Harcourt. Knowing how to address people appropriately is not subservience. It is part of learning how to navigate different environments.

That is an increasingly valuable professional skill.

There is also one detail in the widely discussed interaction that I think has been overlooked. Tony Elumelu did not insist that the young woman address him through an elabourate catalogue of titles. He actually gave her an alternative: she could call him “TOE.”

That matters.

In the Nigerian context, addressing a senior person by their initials can be quite informal. It signals familiarity while still acknowledging the relationship. Anyone who has spent time around Nigerian corporate life will recognize the convention immediately.

So perhaps what we witnessed was less a confrontation between an arrogant elder and an irreverent young person—as the extremes of social media would have it—and more a small collision between different cultural assumptions.

Those collisions are going to happen more often as Nigeria becomes younger, more connected and more global.

The answer cannot be to demand that every old convention survive unchanged. Cultures evolve, and some traditions deserve to evolve with them. But neither should modernization require us to discard every convention that distinguishes Nigerian society from societies elsewhere.

Respect for elders, teachers, mentors and people who have accumulated experience and achievement is one tradition I would be sorry to see disappear.

There is something beautiful about a culture that reminds us that we did not arrive here entirely by ourselves; that there were people before us who learned, built, struggled, taught and achieved things from which the next generation benefits. Showing them respect does not diminish the younger generation. At its best, it connects generations.

And respect, importantly, should never flow in only one direction. Seniority creates obligations as well as privileges. Those who expect respect from younger people must also extend dignity, patience and grace to them.

Which brings us back to this particular episode.

Thank you to the young woman for an innocent faux pas that unexpectedly opened an interesting national conversation about culture, generations and respect. And thank you to Tony Elumelu for addressing it—and, importantly, for doing so without allowing a small cultural correction to become a personal conflict.

Perhaps there is a useful lesson in that for the rest of us.

There is room in modern Nigeria for informality and tradition, for questioning authority and respecting experience, for young people finding their voice and older generations preserving things worth preserving.

Above all, there is room for cultural difference—and for grace on both sides.

Dr. Wiebe Boer, Chief Growth Officer of JIPA Network, and Editorial Advisory Board member, BusinessDay