Good morning, Tony!

In June, 2006 when I moved into Enugu, it was a huge culture shock for my family and me. One example should be persuasive of the shock. A few days after our arrival, I took my three-year-old son to meet my Unilag classmate, Dan Nwomeh and his friends at the Presidential Hotel. On sighting them, the poor boy prostrated on all fours. Apparently aghast at the sight, Nwomeh’s friends burst into laughter. Terrified by what he perceived a rejection, my son cried. When we got back home, I took him on a tutorial on cross-cultural norms and beliefs. “You have left Yorubaland where prostrating to elders is a required social code. Here, all you do is offer polite greetings,” I told him. From that day, he adjusted.

A few years earlier, in 1996, I was totally troubled by what I thought was an abhorrent act of my neighbour, a young Benue State-born couple. I presume the couple’s tribe was Idoma. I arrived my one-room apartment to be told that their lad, Oche, who was ill, had passed. As I mourned, preparatory to meting them to offer my condolences, I heard clanking of bottles and heavy celebratory songs. When I walked into their living room, the sight that confronted me was terrifying. Pounded yam and assorted drinks were on offer. Guests and family of the late kid were downing both as if they had just won a tombola. I took my excuse and faded out.

In Enugu, more culture shocks awaited me. In conversations, office subordinates willfully spiked the prefix, “Brother” that accompanies such exchanges in western Nigeria. Conversely, I found out that the Igbo are highly respectful in other areas. On Enugu streets, I got greetings from young and old strangers who did not know me from Adam. This is a habit that is fast dying in Yorubaland. Younger ones walk past you without the sound of a hoof.

When last week, billionaire businessman and UBA Group Chairman, Tony Elumelu, corrected a female graduate trainee who casually greeted him as “Tony” during an interactive session, it provoked viral claims and counterclaims. The young lady had greeted Elumelu “Good morning, Tony”. Though the business octopus initially approached this greeting with a smile, thinking she said “Toyin?” upon clarification, he pleasantly stopped her and said: “No, you won’t call me Tony. I’m not… you’ll call me Mr Elumelu or TOE [Tony Onyemaechi Elumelu] or Chairman. I don’t subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life.”

The exchange quickly spread like bushfire in harmattan. While many supported Elumelu on need to maintain Africa’s traditional values of respect for seniority, even in a corporate world, others felt Elumelu’s correction was a put-down for a nervous trainee perceived to have been a victim of stage fright.

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Others, like Omoyele Sowore, saw double standard. A video of an earlier engagement Elumelu had with a Stanford University student who cavalierly referred to him as “Tony” was used to illustrate this claim. It was later shown that Elumelu gave the young UBA trainee lady the necessary pad and advice in her career switch from a TikToker to a staff of UBA.

Both proponents, to my mind, have strong arguments. I suspect that that young lady must have been railroaded by banks’ corporate tradition and perhaps, UBA’s staff, who, apologies to Chief Rotimi Williams and his “death of Simply Mister” battle of The Guardian newspaper of the 1980s, that everyone was addressed as “Simply their first names”.

The greatest asset of the Blackman and Africa in particular is our tradition and culture. Regrettably, they are dying. I remember when, sometime in 2006, Ebeno Topsy, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, paid a courtesy call on the governor of Enugu State. Upon meeting him in the full glare of the world, I gave him an all-four dòbálè which many onlookers at the Lion Building couldn’t fathom. I was very proud of myself. I guess Ebeno was, too.

I think Elumelu did well by underscoring the values of Africa at that event. His genial receipt of same greeting in Stanford is immaterial. This is because, there, he was in Rome and needed to do like Romans. But here is Africa. Nigeria. As viral videos have also confirmed, even American memoirist and essayist, Maya Angelou, walked the Elumelu route. In a 1990 recording of the television show, People Are Talking, Ms Angelou was taken aback when Kim Watts, a 20-year-old audience member named Kim Watts, began her question to her with a reference to her as “Maya”. Not one to suffer fools gladly, Angelou stopped that descent and said, “And first, I’m Ms Angelou. I’m not Maya… you have no licence to come up to me and call me by my first name.” Like Elumelu, she however, later offered her apologies to Watts for the curt outburst, never for a moment shy from underscoring the kernel of respect and discipline which should be the forte of all generations.