Have you seen the exchange between Mr Tony Elumelu, Chairman of UBA, and the young lady who addressed him simply as “Tony”?
That brief encounter says something about the cultural transition taking place in our society: the sometimes awkward marriage between Western informality and traditional African notions of respect.
A young woman, probably the age of Mr Elumelu’s daughter, addressed him by his first name. To her, perhaps, it was perfectly normal. In today’s globalised world, first names are regarded as symbols of equality and accessibility. In our own culture, however, age, status and accomplishment usually come with a title, an honorific or, at the very least, a respectful distance.
This is not entirely strange. Those of us who maintain a presence on social media encounter it almost daily. A young person disagrees with your position on a public issue. Instead of engaging your argument, he throws the argument away, rolls up his sleeves and begins to abuse you. Within minutes, you have been called everything except the name your parents gave you.
Sometimes, out of curiosity, I visit the person’s profile. Often, I discover someone very young, poorly informed and apparently in urgent need of lessons in both logic and manners. He has not read what you wrote carefully, but he is already furious. His temperament resembles that of Ṣàngó, the Yoruba god of thunder, while his vocabulary appears to have been borrowed from a quarrel at a motor park.
Have you ever spoken on the telephone with a commercial driver sent to deliver goods to you by waybill?
“Hello, where are you?”
“I am in my house.”
“Which house?”
“My house now!”
That, sometimes, is the quality of our public conversation.
Some years ago, I served on a Senate ad hoc committee investigating the privatisation of public enterprises. We visited a company owned by a prominent businessman but managed by his son. The young man could easily have been the son of any member of the committee. Indeed, he was barely old enough to be the last child of one of us—a retired general who had already served as a federal minister when I was just leaving secondary school.
After keeping us waiting for some time, the young man finally entered the room and greeted us:
“How are you guys?”
Guys?
Just like that? Guys bí ti báwo?
I looked around to be certain that he was speaking to a Senate committee and not welcoming his friends to a barbecue.
Throughout the meeting, he continued to refer to us as “guys” until the retired general could bear it no longer.
“Stop this ‘guys’ business, young man,” he snapped. “Even your father would not refer to me as a guy.”
The message landed. For the rest of the meeting, the “guys” were restored to their full constitutional dignity.
On another occasion, while we were touring the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, I sat beside the same retired general in a bus. A young man telephoned him, and I heard the general ask angrily:
“Who is your father? You are threatening me that you will ensure I do not return to the Senate?”
When the call ended, I asked what had happened. He explained that a young man, young enough to be his grandchild, had been abusing and threatening him over the telephone. I pleaded with him to calm down and reminded him that we were confronting a generation raised in an age when deference to elders was rapidly disappearing.
It is often an impatient, all-knowing generation that, unfortunately, does not always know very much. Yet those of us formed by an earlier ethos must learn patience. We should correct firmly but without needless anger, as Mr Elumelu did. He did not insult the young lady or turn the encounter into a lecture lasting three semesters. He simply reminded her of the appropriate way to address him.
We have also seen young people who can barely construct a coherent sentence rain insults on Professor Wole Soyinka, a man well into his nineties and a giant to generations of writers, intellectuals and activists. One may disagree with Soyinka—he has never asked anyone to surrender the right to think—but what strange spirit makes a person believe that disagreement must be accompanied by abuse?
A highly respected Yoruba monarch recently forwarded to me something a young man had written about Soyinka.
“Femi, we must come out and defend this man. This is too much,” Kabiyesi said.
I smiled.
“Kabiyesi, keep your peace,” I replied. “This is the ‘Hi, Tony’ era.”
No one says that a younger person cannot disagree with an elder. When Soyinka was in his fifties and we were his students, we disagreed with him in the classroom, at seminars and at public events, especially on questions of ideology. When he managed the theatre on campus and we woke up one morning to discover that the entrance fees had been increased, Mr Femi Falana led us in protest against him.
But we did not insult Soyinka. We marshalled our arguments and boycotted activities at the theatre until the matter was resolved. We challenged the decision without stripping the man of his dignity. There is a difference between dissent and disrespect. Unfortunately, that distinction is becoming increasingly endangered.
There also comes a point in the life of a public figure when his first name, surname or nickname becomes a national identity requiring no prefix. But context matters.
Behind Chief Obafemi Awolowo—or at political rallies—people affectionately called him “Awo.” Imagine, however, a 30-year-old walking up to him and saying, “Hello, Obafemi!”
The temperature in the room would have changed immediately.
The same applies to Zik, Soyinka, Tinubu and other public figures whose names have acquired symbolic meaning. Used in public discourse, the shortened name may convey familiarity, affection or even veneration. Used carelessly to the person’s face, it may sound condescending. We must learn to separate the two.
In my community, virtually everyone calls me Ojudu. That is perfectly acceptable. But woe betide the young person who walks up to me, taps me on the shoulder and says, “Femi, how far?”
My father once told me the story of a local toughie who had a serious disagreement with the king. He went to the palace, stood before the monarch and poured out a torrent of abuse—but while doing so, he carefully faced the wall, not the king.
A panel of chiefs was set up to try him. In his defence, he insisted that he had never abused the king.
“I was abusing the wall,” he said.
His reasoning was simple: who would dare look a king directly in the face and insult him?
Even rebellion once had manners.
Still, we must recognise that society is changing, and we must approach these young people with some understanding. We are partly responsible for the cultural confusion we now complain about. We sent many of them abroad before they were old enough to understand their own heritage. They absorbed foreign manners before they had fully acquired indigenous values. What emerged was a cultural mixture—neither entirely Western nor sufficiently African.
The result is: “Hi, Tony.”
We are the ones who failed to root them deeply in our culture or provide them with the tools to understand our ways. They are the “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” generation, not the generation that sat at the feet of elders under the moonlight, listening to stories about Ìjàpá and his wife, Yánníbo. We were weaned on the monthly journal Àpótí Ìṣúra, that book of morals, Aláwìíyè, the poems of J. F. Ọ̀dúnjọ́ and the novels of D. O. Fágúnwà.
Yes, our children can crunch data like supercomputers and are wizards at coding. Yet there is more to life than that.
The school curriculum that alienates children from their heritage, the homes that no longer teach indigenous values, and the wider environment that portrays our culture as backward have combined to produce the “Hello, Tony” phenomenon.
Therefore, before we condemn the young entirely, we should ask what we taught them. Respect is not inherited automatically; it must be modelled, explained and cultivated. We cannot refuse to plant the seed and then become angry when the tree does not grow.
The young must learn that modernity does not require the abandonment of manners. The old must also understand that respect can no longer be demanded merely on account of age; it must be reinforced by character and example.
Somewhere between unquestioning deference and reckless familiarity lies the balance we need: a society in which young people may question elders without insulting them, and elders may correct young people without crushing their confidence.
Until we find that balance, we must prepare ourselves.
Tomorrow, someone may walk up to Professor Soyinka and say:
“Wole, my guy, how far?”