Elumelu, etiquette, and the grammar we are forgetting — by Folorunso Adisa

There are moments when a seemingly insignificant sentence opens a much larger window into a society. “Good morning, Tony” was only four words, but in the Nigerian context, those four words have provoked a conversation far bigger than the young woman who uttered them or the billionaire who objected to them. What the exchange between Tony Elumelu and a young graduate trainee has really exposed is a translation problem: a generation fluent in the vocabulary of global modernity but losing its grip on the grammar of home.

At the UBAGraduate Management Accelerated Programme graduation ceremony in Lagos, a young trainee addressed the UBA Group Chairman simply as “Tony” before asking her question. Elumelu stopped her and told her to address him as Mr Elumelu or “TOE,” adding that he did not subscribe to that kind of “Oyinbo life.” The trainee corrected herself and continued. The exchange went viral, producing the predictable division: those who saw the greeting as an unacceptable breach of Nigerian etiquette, and those who considered it harmless, even progressive, within the culture of contemporary corporate workplaces.

I belong to the first camp, though with a qualification worth stating precisely. Calling someone by his first name is not intrinsically disrespectful. Context determines meaning. In some Western workplaces, first-name address is perfectly ordinary, even between a chief executive and a junior employee. But culture does not travel with a language the way luggage travels with a passenger. A word can cross borders intact while its meaning is quietly confiscated at customs. What reads as egalitarian in a Glasgow office can read as insolence in a Lagos boardroom, not because Nigerians are less modern, but because the two settings are speaking different social languages that happen to share the same words.

I am a Yoruba young man, and I know the place of age, hierarchy and deference in my culture. In Yoruba society, respect is not ornamental etiquette. It is social grammar, the syntax beneath the sentence, invisible until it is broken. One does not have to be wealthy, famous or powerful before deserving courtesy. Age itself carries an expectation of regard, while achievement can deepen it. That instinct was not manufactured by capitalism, banking or colonial administration. It predates all of them.

This is why I find the argument that young Nigerians must abandon these conventions in the name of sophistication rather curious. We can embrace innovation without amputating inheritance. We can become globally competitive without becoming culturally homeless. Translation, done well, does not erase the original text. It carries it, intact, into a new tongue.

I know what that translation looks like in practice because I do it weekly. I have a Nigerian colleague in the United Kingdom, considerably older than I am, in an office where junior staff address the department head by first name without a second thought. Two months ago, standing beside his desk with a coffee in hand, I called him by that first name while we discussed a report, exactly as every other colleague in that open-plan office would. Twenty minutes later, in a WhatsApp voice note to the same man, on a thread made up entirely of Nigerians scattered across the city, I opened with “Egbon mi, good evening sir” without pausing to think about it. Same man, same day, two different grammars, switched as automatically as changing lanes. I was not being inconsistent. I was being fluent in both languages at once, which is precisely the skill this controversy is really about.

Sociolinguistics gives us a useful vocabulary for understanding this. Michael Silverstein’s work on “indexical order” explains how linguistic forms point to social relationships, identities and values within particular contexts. Language is not simply a vessel for information. How we address another person can communicate intimacy, distance, deference or contempt. “Tony” and “Mr Elumelu” may refer to the same man while carrying entirely different social meanings, depending on who is speaking, to whom, and where.

Culture itself is not a museum artefact preserved unchanged behind glass. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz described culture as a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols. Those meanings evolve. But evolution is not erasure, and translation is not betrayal. A society, like a language, can grow without forgetting how to speak its mother tongue.

This is where I part company with those who have turned the Elumelu incident into an indictment of Westernisation or of corporate Nigeria. It would be intellectually lazy to suggest that every young Nigerian who uses a first name with an older person has become culturally deracinated. Nor should we romanticise every Nigerian custom simply because it is old. Some traditions deserve to disappear; others deserve protection. The real question is whether we possess enough cultural intelligence to translate correctly, reading context the way a good interpreter reads a room before choosing a word.

If Elumelu had been at a relaxed private gathering and invited the young woman to call him Tony, there would have been no issue. If a workplace explicitly establishes first-name address as its norm, as some Nigerian tech start-ups and creative agencies now do quite deliberately, there should be no manufactured scandal when employees follow that convention.

But a formal public ceremony, a young trainee addressing the chairman before a large audience, is precisely the setting in which translation matters most. The question was never whether “Tony” is grammatically correct. It is whether it was the right word in that particular room.

I therefore commend Elumelu for correcting her, not because every older person must be addressed with ceremonial reverence, but because people should be allowed to define how they wish to be addressed. His correction was also an opportunity to teach, and the young woman accepted it. That should have been the end of the matter. Instead, social media turned a brief correction into another battlefield in Nigeria’s endless generational war.

Here is the part I will not qualify. Some young Nigerians have been sold a dangerous and frankly false equation: that confidence requires insolence, that deference is weakness, that familiarity is sophistication. That is not modernity. It is mistranslation dressed up as progress, and it produces a generation fluent in the world’s vocabulary while illiterate in its own family’s grammar. No amount of context or generational sympathy changes that verdict.

The family remains one of the primary sites of socialisation, and respect cannot be outsourced to schools or corporations. Children learn from what they repeatedly see, not just what they are told. If the home treats courtesy as archaic, the child will eventually mistranslate it as irrelevance.

To be fair, the responsibility does not sit only with the young. Some elders demand deference as tribute rather than earn it through conduct worthy of respect, mistaking age for automatic entitlement. That, too, is a mistranslation of the same culture being invoked to defend Elumelu. Respect, properly understood, moves in both directions: elders owe the young courtesy and mentorship, just as the young owe elders acknowledgement and regard.

The danger is not that Nigeria is changing. Nigeria must change. The danger is that, in our desperate pursuit of a borrowed definition of sophistication, we may mistake the loss of our own grammar for fluency in someone else’s.

There is nothing wrong with learning the world’s language. There is everything wrong with learning it so well that we forget our own. Every society needs interpreters, people who can move between boardrooms in Lagos, lecture halls in Oxford and offices in New York without losing their bearings. What it cannot survive is a generation of translators who have quietly stopped speaking the original.

Picture a child at a family gathering years from now, greeting an uncle in fluent English, perfectly at home in the language of a globalised world but unfamiliar with the Yoruba expressions that once carried reverence into such encounters. The uncle will receive a handshake where a bow once lived, a smile where a stooped shoulder once spoke louder than any greeting. Nobody will have taken those courtesies from her. She will simply have stopped needing them, one small surrender at a time, until the silence where “E kaaro, baba mi” once belonged feels ordinary rather than empty. That is the real cost of forgetting how to bow.

The conversation does not end here. You can continue it with me on X via @folorunso_adisa, LinkedIn: Folorunso Fatai Adisa, or on Facebook at Folorunso Fatai Adisa.