By Temitope Lakisokun
The argument over the young trainee who addressed UBA chairman Tony Elumelu by his first name has become a surprisingly revealing debate about Nigerian society.
One side says she was disrespectful. The other says she did nothing wrong: UBA has a first-name culture, and she followed it.
I think both sides are looking at the wrong thing.
The question is not whether she should have said “Good morning, Tony.” It is why a convention that once seemed progressive and liberating has become so awkward when applied across generations.
The answer has something to do with second-order thinking.
First-order thinking asks: What is the immediate benefit of this change?
Second-order thinking asks: What happens because of the change? And what happens after that?
Nigeria has never been particularly good at the second question.
Consider the case of the civil servants Murtala Mohammed dismissed in 1975. They had spent their careers in government service, accumulating little beyond their salaries and quarters, no private property, no cushion against sudden displacement. Most had no reason to steal; they worked diligently because they trusted that government would honour its side of the bargain. But when the dismissal came, many were left destitute, their years of service counting for nothing. The lesson was not lost on those who survived the purge. They saw what happened to their senior colleagues and concluded that loyalty was no protection. If government could discard them at will, they had better secure themselves while they could. They saw what loyalty had cost their predecessors and resolved that they would not suffer the same fate. That was the day Nigeria’s corruption problem found its institutional footing. A straight line runs from that moment to the present.
The great first-name revolution
Sometime in the corporate culture of the 1980s and 1990s, a number of Nigerian executives began importing ideas from American business schools and corporate America, most of them fresh from a three- or four-week course at Harvard or Yale, which, by a happy coincidence, was just enough time to be thoroughly convinced of everything!
Among the ideas that arrived was the notion that hierarchy should be softened by having people call one another by their first names.
It made sense at the time.
Nigeria’s corporate culture could be excessively deferential. The distance between oga and subordinate made honest conversation difficult. Junior employees might hesitate to challenge senior executives. A first-name culture promised to make the workplace less intimidating.
For a time, it worked. Most executives were peers in age and experience. Calling the managing director “Tony” or “Fola,” did not erase hierarchy; everyone still knew who held what position. The informality simply sat on top of an already understood structure. Everyone felt a little more modern, and y’know, more “with it.” This was the early ‘90s version of performative modernity.
The trouble began when time did what time always does.
The contemporaries became elders.
Then their children joined the organisations.
Now, their grandchildren are arriving as graduate trainees and interns.
It’s safe to say the old convention has encountered a circumstance its original architects had not really considered.
Imagine a chairman in his mid-to-late sixties addressing a room of young trainees. Some of them are young enough to be his grandchildren. The corporate rule says: “Call me Tony.”
The society outside the office says: “This is your elder.” So, which instruction is the young person supposed to follow?
That is the real problem and the fence nobody asked about.
G. K. Chesterton’s famous argument about the fence is useful here.
If you encounter a fence in the middle of a road and cannot see why it is there, the sensible response is not immediately to tear it down. First ask why someone put it there. Perhaps the fence is unnecessary. Perhaps it is protecting something you cannot see. Either way, you need to understand its purpose before removing it.
Social conventions are often like that.
A title may appear unnecessarily formal, but such conventions often perform a social function that becomes invisible precisely because they have worked for so long.
This, in my opinion, is what the Nigerian corporate first-name revolution failed to consider. It borrowed the visible feature of another culture without necessarily considering the social system around it.
America’s informal corporate culture did not develop in a vacuum. It sits within a particular history of individualism, social mobility and attitudes toward authority.
For centuries, Nigerian societies have attached meaning to age, seniority, office, lineage and relationship. The language of respect was one of the ways society organised itself.
A younger person knew how to address or greet an elder. A subject knew how to address a king. A junior knew how to address a senior. An apprentice knew how to address a master.
These distinctions did not necessarily mean that one human being was worth more than another. What they did was establish relationship. Unfortunately, relationship is the thing the first-name convention can obscure.
Respect is not the same thing as servility
There is an understandable desire among younger Nigerians to reject the old culture of oga and madam, particularly when those titles are used to demand obedience rather than to acknowledge legitimate authority. That criticism is fair because respect should never become a licence for humiliation. But the answer to excessive deference is not necessarily the elimination of every marker of seniority.
The French still distinguish between “tu” and “vous.” Japanese language has “san” and a much wider system of honorific speech. These societies have modern economies, sophisticated corporations and highly educated young people. They have not concluded that acknowledging social distance is incompatible with modernity.
But here in Nigeria?!
Social hierarchy must disappear because “we woke.”
If UBA’s established culture is that employees call one another by their first names, then it is difficult to pile on the young lady. She may have done exactly what the institution taught her to do.
And that is precisely why the incident is more revealing than a simple story about an impolite young Nigerian.
The institution created the convention, which the employee followed.
The convention then produced a result that many people instinctively felt was wrong. Should that not make us examine the convention rather than simply blame the individual?
The original intention may have been useful in reducing unnecessary distance between people. But second-order thinking asks what happens when that convention is carried forward for thirty years.
A policy designed by contemporaries for contemporaries has now encountered a new generation and a well-intentioned corporate convention has become an albatross.
The deeper Nigerian problem
This is not really an argument for returning to an age of rigid hierarchy.
It is an argument for thinking before we dismantle things.
Nigeria has a habit of importing institutional ideas because they appear modern, without asking what assumptions make them work in their original setting. We inherit the form without understanding the function. A whole lot of, (ahem) religious practices come to mind here.
This is what Chesterton’s fence is about.
Before removing an old convention, ask what it was doing. Before telling every Nigerian employee to call every senior person by his or her first name, ask one very simple question:
What happens when the chairman is old enough to be the intern’s grandfather?
That question should have been asked thirty odd years ago.
The awkwardness lies in the system itself: a borrowed convention that was designed to soften hierarchy but was never properly reconsidered as the generations changed.
The lesson is not that young Nigerians must learn to fear their elders. It is that modernity does not require us to forget why certain social conventions existed in the first place. We are not “oyinbo.”
Respect can coexist with equality just as much as warmth can coexist with formality.
And perhaps the next time we encounter a Nigerian convention that seems old-fashioned, we should resist the reflex to tear it down simply because someone in Boston, Palo Alto or at Harvard Business School does things differently.
First ask:
Why was the fence built?
* Lakisokun, a Political Consultant, and Chair of Trustees of the Tarihi Trust Foundation, writes from Lagos
