Growing up in a Nigerian household, there were certain customs and rules that had to be followed, especially regarding age and maturity.
I never called an elder or an older cousin by their first name alone, no matter the setting. It was “Cousin Jerry” and “Cousin Sarah,” even for relatives only a few years older than me. Respectability politics were drilled in early on. Titles, in my house and most Nigerian households I knew, were part of a person’s identity.
That upbringing is why I understood Tony Elumelu’s response before I understood the backlash to it.
Elumelu, chairman of United Bank for Africa (UBA) and Heirs Holdings, stopped a Graduate Management Accelerated Programme trainee mid-greeting at a Lagos graduation ceremony recently after she said, “Good morning, Tony.”
Elumelu initially misheard her, asking “Toyin? Toyin?” before she clarified. His response, since viewed millions of times online, “You won’t call me Tony … you’ll call me Mr. Elumelu or TOE. I don’t subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo [foreigner] life.” The trainee corrected herself, greeting him again as “Mr. Elumelu,” and the exchange continued.
The clip went viral within hours. UBA has an internal workplace culture that encourages staff and trainees to address colleagues on a first-name basis to flatten hierarchy, despite claims circulating online. Some defend Elumelu’s insistence on formal address, and others call it an overreaction to a generational norm.
The debate intensified when an older video resurfaced showing a Stanford Graduate School of Business student greeting Elumelu simply as “Tony” during a 2022 campus event, without correction.
I don’t think it’s that simple, and I don’t think it should be. If I met Elumelu tomorrow, I would call him “Mr. Elumelu” by default, and wait for him to tell me otherwise. That instinct isn’t outdated. It’s cultural literacy, and it’s the same instinct my upbringing spent years reinforcing.
American corporate culture, for as long as I can remember, has flattened hierarchy on purpose, first-name email signatures, “call me by my first name” onboarding scripts, and open-door executive suites. Those are legitimate regional business trends. They are not a universal professional standard.
James Brown required his entire band and business associates to call him “Mr. Brown,” reportedly fining musicians on the spot for slipping into first names, according to multiple accounts from former band members. As a Black man growing up during the Jim Crow era in America, he faced a society that systematically denied Black men basic respect, as evidenced by white individuals often referring to them as “boy” or by their first names, while only using titles like “Mister” for whites.
Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the Pan-African historian who helped build Africana studies as an academic discipline at Hunter College and Cornell University, was known throughout his six-decade teaching career for the formal “Dr. Clarke,” a title colleagues say he wore as proof of ground gained in institutions that historically excluded Black scholars.
Maya Angelou’s own correction of a young woman is perhaps the most widely cited example. In a resurfaced 1990 television clip, a young audience member addressed her as “Maya.” Angelou replied, “I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, has no license to come up to me and call me by my first name.” She later apologized for her tone, but not for the boundary itself.
None of this makes the UBA trainee a villain. By all accounts, she broke no written rule. She was culturally ignorant but not disrespectful. That distinction matters, and it’s the one getting lost as younger professionals, raised on flatter, first-name American workplace culture, inherit fewer of the respectability norms that shaped their parents’ and grandparents’ lives.
Global fluency for the next generation of Black professionals can’t mean assuming the American way is the only way. It means learning the room before you’re in it.
