A young graduate trainee at United Bank for Africa was asking a question during the Graduate Management Acceleration Programme (GMAP) when she said, “Good morning, Tony.”
Tony Elumelu stopped her. He corrected her. He told her he preferred “Mr Elumelu,” “TOE,” or “Chairman.” He added that he does not subscribe to “that kind of oyinbo life.”
The clip, or the account of it, spread quickly. Many Nigerians responded with familiar certainty: the young woman had been disrespectful. She had failed to show proper cultural deference. She had forgotten her place. In the court of public opinion the verdict was swift and almost unanimous. The trainee was culturally guilty.
The story is more awkward than that.
According to Innocent Istifanus Moses, a former UBA staff member who completed the same Graduate Management Acceleration Programme (GMAP) and later worked as a Cash Officer, the bank’s graduate curriculum explicitly teaches participants to address colleagues by their first names, regardless of rank. Trainers, he says, use the Group Managing Director as an example. The philosophy is deliberate: everyone is a colleague. The point of the training is to reduce hierarchical barriers inside the organisation. Moses completed the identical programme and is familiar with the reasoning behind it.
UBA has not publicly denied that this is how its graduate programme is structured. The young woman was therefore applying a rule she had been taught by the institution that employs her, in the presence of the man who preferred a different rule. That is not straightforward insolence. It is an institutional contradiction made visible in a public moment.
Nigeria is a country where status is currency.
Elumelu is fully entitled to decide how he wishes to be addressed. Age, ownership of the institution, and the public setting all give him that right. No serious argument can be made that a junior staff member has an absolute claim to first-name familiarity with the chairman. The problem is not his preference. The problem is the speed and unanimity with which many observers treated the trainee’s greeting as a cultural offence rather than an awkward collision between two different codes.
A large part of what passes for “respect” or “culture” in Nigerian social and political circles is pure status performance. The “Do you know who I am?” syndrome is real and widely practised. It is why people scramble for honorary doctorates, buy actual doctorates, acquire traditional titles, inflate CVs, and insist on being addressed by rank rather than by name. Titles have become one of the primary currencies of worth. When that happens, people manufacture them, purchase them, or enforce them with theatrical severity.
The symptoms are everywhere. Fake certificates circulate. Invented or purchased chieftaincy titles appear on letterheads. Public figures demand prefixes that signal elevation. One of the prominent anchors on Arise News is known to insist on being called “Doctor.” These are not isolated eccentricities. They are expressions of a deeper cultural logic in which the performance of hierarchy often matters more than the substance of the relationship or the work being done.
In such an environment, the first-name instruction inside a corporate graduate programme was always going to create friction. The programme’s designers appear to have been trying to import a flatter organisational culture — the kind of environment in which ideas can travel upward without being blocked by excessive deference rituals. That ambition collides with a wider Nigerian habit of treating rank as the first and most important fact about any interaction.
The Elumelu incident is useful precisely because it is clean. The bank trains its young talent to treat senior colleagues as colleagues. The most senior person in the room rejects the practice when it is applied to him. The public then sides almost automatically with the demand for hierarchical address and treats the trainee as the one who erred.
This reaction reveals more about the observers than about the young woman. Status anxiety overrides consistency with remarkable speed. The same society that celebrates “global best practice” and corporate modernity in bank advertising still recoils when that modernity is practised in a way that momentarily flattens rank. The demand for titles is not always about genuine respect. Often it is about the reassurance that the hierarchy remains intact and visible.
There is nothing uniquely Nigerian about hierarchical preferences. Many cultures maintain formal address. What is distinctive is the intensity with which titles are pursued, purchased, and policed, and the moral weight attached to their correct deployment. When the primary measure of a person’s value becomes the cluster of honorifics that precede their name, the society begins to reward performance over competence and theatre over substance.
True respect is not the same thing as ritual deference. Respect can exist in first-name cultures; it can also be entirely absent in environments thick with titles. The difference is whether the form of address is serving clarity and mutual regard, or whether it is mainly serving the ego of the higher-ranking party and the anxiety of those lower down.
The GMAP approach, as described by someone who went through it, attempted to reduce the second kind of transaction. Whether that attempt was wisely designed or naively optimistic is a separate question. What the public reaction to the Elumelu exchange demonstrates is how quickly many people default to the second model and treat any departure from it as cultural failure.
Elumelu’s preference is his to state. The trainee’s application of her training was not, on the available evidence, an act of calculated insolence. The more interesting phenomenon is the readiness of so many observers to read the moment exclusively through the lens of hierarchical offence. That readiness is itself a cultural fact worth examining.
When titles become the main currency of worth, people will manufacture them, buy them, or enforce them. Fake certificates and invented traditional titles are only the most obvious symptoms. The deeper condition is the continuous performance of status as a substitute for more demanding forms of mutual recognition. The young woman who said “Good morning, Tony” walked straight into that condition. The reaction that followed showed how thoroughly it still governs the public square.
Daily Justice editorial
