A three word greeting has exposed a deep Nigerian question: can Africa embrace modern corporate culture without amputating the cultural instincts that taught generations to recognise age, authority, responsibility, and honour within human relationships today?
The Elumelu controversy is therefore far larger than whether a young professional should say “Tony” or “Mr Elumelu.” It interrogates a generational collision between egalitarian corporate language and Africa’s deeply ingrained architecture of respect.
Gen Z should understand this distinction: equality of human worth does not mean equality of institutional role. Holy Scripture affirms universal dignity before God, while simultaneously recognising authority, elders, leadership, responsibility, and appropriate social honour.
The Bible is unequivocal: “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.” Christianity therefore neither canonises hierarchy nor celebrates insolence. It demands humility from subordinates and moral restraint from those exercising authority.
African culture, at its noblest, never regarded respect as servility. Courtesy functioned as social grammar, communicating age, wisdom, responsibility, kinship, and institutional standing. Discarding that grammar entirely may produce modernity without civilisation, sophistication without substance.
Yet culture must never become an alibi for humiliation. An inexperienced graduate can be corrected without being publicly diminished. Leadership becomes truly consequential when authority educates the inexperienced rather than converting minor mistakes into spectacles.
The model is compelling: “Let all your things be done with charity.” Correction without compassion becomes chastisement; authority without tenderness becomes intimidation. Those entrusted with influence must remember that dignity belongs to powerful and vulnerable.
Gen Z must resist the fiction that informality is synonymous with progress. Calling senior executives by first names may be acceptable in some institutions, but intelligence requires contextual discernment, not reflexive imitation of workplace conventions.
A boardroom, church, traditional council, classroom, family gathering, and informal conversation possess linguistic codes. Mature professionals learn to navigate these registers without hypocrisy. Knowing when familiarity is appropriate and when formality is prudent constitutes discernment.
Older generations also require introspection. Respect cannot be perpetually demanded as tribute to age, wealth, title, or office. Authentic authority becomes persuasive through character, competence, restraint, mentorship, and service. Leadership that humiliates ultimately diminishes itself.
The lesson for Africa is neither cultural absolutism nor uncritical Westernisation. We can master artificial intelligence, finance, corporate governance, and communication while retaining African courtesy. Modernisation should expand intellectual horizons without erasing our memory entirely.
The conclusion is simple: the young should learn respectful familiarity, while the old should practise gracious correction. Gen Z needs humility; leaders need tenderness. Africa needs both because society suffers whenever dignity separates from discipline.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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