When Respect Becomes Deference

At a recent graduation ceremony for United Bank for Africa's Graduate Management Accelerated Programme, a young woman stood up to ask Tony Elumelu a question.

"Good morning, Tony," she began.

Elumelu initially appeared to hear "Toyin," so she repeated herself: "I said good morning, Tony." He then told her not to call him Tony and gave her alternatives: Mr Elumelu, T.O.E., or Chairman. "I don't subscribe to that kind of oyinbo life," he added.

She corrected herself. "Good morning, Mr Elumelu." Only then did she continue with her question.

The clip is less than thirty seconds long. I was not at the event and, at the time of writing, I have not seen the full interaction. I do not know what the participants were told beforehand or which rules of engagement had been established. That limitation matters. A short clip should make us careful about declaring anyone's intent.

But the exchange still tells us something. More importantly, the arguments people have made in response to it tell us something about how we understand respect, culture, and power.

My straightforward view is that the woman was not clearly wrong—not from the context available to us. Elumelu was entitled to say how he preferred to be addressed. What I question is how that preference was communicated and why so many people believe she should have known it without being told.

A preference is not an unwritten rule

Everyone should be able to choose how they want to be addressed. This applies to names, titles, pronunciations, and pronouns. If someone tells me they prefer "Mr Elumelu" to "Tony," there is nothing unreasonable about respecting that preference.

The difficulty is that people cannot know a personal preference the first time they meet us. There has to be room for a good-faith mistake and enough grace to correct it.

"I prefer Mr Elumelu" and "you won't call me Tony" communicate roughly the same preference, but they do not communicate the same relationship. One states a boundary. The other also reminds the listener who has the power to enforce it.

That distinction becomes more important in a room where one person is a graduate trainee and the other is the chairman of the organisation. There was never any doubt about who had more status. The young woman could not respond with the same force, even if she believed the correction was unfair. Grace should matter most where the difference in power is greatest.

Some people have argued that this was a formal corporate event and that she should have addressed the chairman accordingly. That argument depends on the organisation's actual rules.

If UBA had clearly told its trainees to use formal titles at the ceremony, then she broke a known rule. That would be a straightforward workplace matter. But others familiar with corporate banking have said that employees are often trained to address people by their first names. If that was also the culture communicated to these graduates, then the problem is not that she failed to read the room. The organisation gave her conflicting signals.

An institution is allowed to define its culture. What it should not do is leave a rule unstated, enforce a different rule when a powerful person enters the room, and then blame the least powerful person for not anticipating the exception.

What exactly is the cultural context?

The most common defence I have seen is that she failed to understand the cultural context. Perhaps calling a senior executive by his first name is acceptable in the United States or Europe, the argument goes, but not in Nigeria. She should have read the room.

My question is: what exactly was she expected to read?

Was the rule about age? His position in the company? His wealth? The formality of the ceremony? Was it a rule of UBA, a general Nigerian rule, or Elumelu's personal preference? Each explanation creates a different obligation, yet they are often collapsed into the phrase "cultural context" as if its meaning is obvious to everybody.

Nigeria does not have one uniform cultural context. Neither does Yoruba culture, which is the tradition I know most personally. Even practices that appear familiar can change from one community or family to another.

Where I grew up, a girl or woman may kneel when greeting an elder, while a boy or man may prostrate. But there are different ways of kneeling that are accepted in some Yoruba communities and regarded as inadequate in others. We also do not perform these greetings for every older stranger we encounter. The rule changes with the relationship, the setting, and sometimes simply how safe or comfortable we feel.

These expectations are rarely handed to us as a written system. We absorb them. When a child asks why, the answer is often some version of: because you must show respect.

Even the language through which we express these practices changes. I grew up calling my older siblings "Brother" followed by their names. "Brother" is English, not Yoruba, but the title carries a Yoruba understanding of seniority into the English language. Calling someone "Mr" is also not an indigenous Nigerian invention. These are already hybrid practices: local values expressed using forms inherited from somewhere else.

That does not make them meaningless. I still use some of them because they communicate affection and respect to people I care about. But it should make us cautious about declaring one expression timeless, authentic, and compulsory while dismissing another as "oyinbo life." Culture has never been that pure or that static.

Respect for whom?

There is much I value in the culture of respect I grew up with. We are taught to recognise elders, welcome strangers, honour traditional leaders, and behave with consideration toward the people around us. Those are good instincts.

But our practice of respect often moves in one direction: upwards.

The younger person must respect the older person. The employee must respect the executive. The poor person must respect the wealthy person. The politically powerless person must respect the political father. Meanwhile, the person receiving all this respect is sometimes permitted to speak to those below them without the same care.

This is where respect becomes deference. It stops being a mutual recognition of human dignity and becomes an instruction not to challenge someone above you.

I know this from experience. I have been in situations where an older person said something I knew was wrong—something I could demonstrate was wrong—but I could not say so. The cultural demand was not merely that I correct them politely. It was that I should not correct them at all.

The same pattern appears in families where a husband's authority means a wife has little practical input, regardless of who understands the matter better. It appears in politics when the identity of a powerful person changes how we respond to their conduct. It appears whenever "Do you know who I am?" is treated as a serious argument.

Once a person's status determines whether they can be corrected, the problem is no longer etiquette. It is accountability.

Can we innovate without criticism?

The setting of this exchange makes that question difficult to ignore. In its post celebrating the 374 members of this GMAP cohort, UBA described their shared ambition as being "to lead, innovate and make an impact across Africa and beyond." The programme has now run for 21 cohorts and trained more than 5,000 young Africans.

But what kind of organisational culture helps a young professional innovate?

Innovation requires criticism. We improve a product because someone can identify what is not working. We correct a process because someone is allowed to challenge the way it has always been done. We avoid a bad decision because the most junior person in the room can point out something the most senior person has missed.

None of this requires rudeness. Disagreement can be thoughtful, evidence-based, and kind. But it must be possible.

If employees carry a version of cultural respect into the workplace that makes superiors difficult to question, then we also carry its consequences. Can a junior employee challenge an unfair decision? Can they report mistreatment by a highly placed executive? Can they tell a leader that an idea will not work? Can they do so without first calculating whether the truth itself is disrespectful?

We cannot celebrate young people as the future of African innovation while training them to believe that authority is beyond correction. We cannot ask them to lead and, at the same time, teach them that leadership means knowing when to remain silent before a more powerful person.

Culture is something we continue to choose

None of this means that Nigeria should import every Western convention wholesale. The choice is not between preserving our culture exactly as it is and replacing it with someone else's.

Culture is a way of life practised by a group of people. It persists because people continue to practise it, and it changes when their circumstances and convictions change. The Nigerian culture we have today is not identical to the culture of a hundred years ago. The culture a hundred years from now will not be identical to ours.

The useful question is not simply whether a practice is cultural. It is what the practice helps us preserve and what it costs us.

If the value underneath a title or a greeting is respect, we can preserve that value while reconsidering a ritual that produces fear, silence, or inequality. A younger person can respect an elder without surrendering the right to disagree. An employee can respect a chairman without pretending the chairman cannot be wrong. A leader can state how they want to be addressed without publicly diminishing the person who did not already know.

Culture should help us live well together. When part of it prevents criticism, protects power from accountability, or closes the door to better ideas, refinement is not betrayal. It is how a living culture remains worth preserving.

You are free to believe the woman in the video was wrong. But look beyond the instinctive answer and ask yourself why. Was it because she violated a rule she could reasonably have known? Because she failed to honour a preference nobody had communicated? Or because, somewhere along the way, we learned that a person's age, wealth, or position should change not only how politely we speak to them, but whether we are allowed to meet them as an equal human being?