A United Bank for Africa (UBA) trainee called Tony Elumelu, the bank’s Chairman, by his first name and was corrected. The exchange has raised a wider question about hierarchy, imported workplace practices and what respect should look like in a Nigerian company.
The young graduate trainee stood up to address Elumelu and opened with a greeting that would hardly attract attention in many Western offices.
“Good morning, Tony.”
Elumelu stopped her.
“You won’t call me Tony. You’ll call me Mr Elumelu or TOE,” he said, adding that he did not subscribe to that kind of “Oyinbo life.”
The exchange, recorded during a graduation event for UBA’s Graduate Management Accelerated Programme, has since triggered arguments over Gen Z, manners and corporate etiquette.
UBA said more than 700 young professionals completed its 2026 programme, taking the number of GMAP alumni above 5,000. The bank describes the programme as part of its effort to develop the next generation of African banking professionals.
Much of the reaction has focused on the trainee. Was she rude? Should she have known better?
But her choice of address did not come from nowhere.
Current and former bank employees have described first-name address as common across parts of Nigerian banking. One person who said they were undergoing similar training wrote that trainees are taught first-name communication internally, though they believed a formal interaction with Elumelu required greater formality.
That claim has not been independently verified by BEA.
What can be established is that first-name office culture is not unusual in corporate Nigeria.
The more useful question is what happens when the informal culture promoted inside a company meets the unwritten social rules employees bring into it.
Why offices use first names
First-name communication is meant to reduce some of the distance between employees and senior management.
The thinking is that a worker who sees senior executives as approachable may be more willing to contribute ideas, challenge assumptions or deliver uncomfortable information.
A study by Niger Delta University professor Miebi Ugwuzor examined first-name policies among employees of banks, multinationals and other private organisations in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.
It found that companies used such policies to encourage open communication, teamwork and flatter structures. It also recorded discomfort among some workers and argued that employers should take local cultural conditions into account when designing workplace policies.
That tension is easy to understand.
Employees do not join at company without a social history. Ideas about age, authority and respect were formed long before they received a company identity card.
A business can determine how people communicate in the office. It cannot assume those instincts have disappeared.
That is important, particularly as employers try to understand a younger workforce. BEA has previously examined eight common myths about Gen Z workers in Nigeria, including assumptions about their communication style, work ethic and attitude to authority.
Nigeria has its own rules
Nigeria is too culturally diverse for one form of respect to apply everywhere.
Still, age, social position and seniority carry considerable weight across many communities.
Among the Yoruba, for example, sociolinguistic research has found that age, status and kinship influence how people address one another.
This helps explain why someone can work in an organisation where first names are normal and still hesitate before calling a much older person by his first name.
The office rule and the social rule can coexist until an encounter forces a choice.
The difficulty comes when nobody has explained which one takes precedence.
That is where cultural intelligence becomes important.
Companies import management ideas all the time. Some fit in easily. Others need to be interpreted and adapted to the society in which employees actually work.
A first-name culture developed to encourage accessibility does not necessarily have to be reproduced word for word to achieve the same result in Lagos.
Elumelu has been “Tony” before
An older account of Elumelu’s management style makes the incident more complicated.
In 2005, THISDAY columnist Segun Adeniyi sat in on a meeting between Elumelu and four senior Standard Trust Bank executives during discussions around the merger that created the modern UBA.
Adeniyi recalled that all four men addressed Elumelu as Tony.
More importantly, they disagreed openly with him over whether the UBA name should survive the merger.
Adeniyi wrote that the first-name atmosphere helped the executives speak freely, even though there was never any doubt about who was leading the meeting.
So this is not simply a case of Elumelu refusing to allow subordinates to call him Tony.
Apparently, some have.
The circumstances were different.
Senior executives who have worked closely with a chief executive do not have the same relationship with him as a graduate trainee meeting the chairman at a formal event. Rank, familiarity and setting matter.
That is reasonable.
What companies should avoid is making junior workers discover those distinctions through public embarrassment.
If informality changes according to rank or circumstance, employees should understand where those boundaries are to they can thread with caution.
Imported culture needs context
There is no business case for Nigerian companies rejecting a management practice simply because it originated in London, New York or Silicon Valley.
Good ideas travel.
They also need interpretation.
First-name culture contains a useful principle. Junior employees should not be so intimidated by senior people that they cannot speak honestly.
Nigerian ideas about respect contain something useful too. Acknowledging age, achievement and office does not prevent employees from contributing ideas or challenging decisions.
Companies can preserve both.
Calling the chairman Tony does not make a company modern if nobody can disagree with him.
Calling him Mr Elumelu does not make it old-fashioned if the youngest person in the room can question his proposal without fearing for her career.
The substance of the relationship matters more than the form of address.
That is consistent comfortably with Elumelu’s own public thinking on leadership. In an earlier BEA examination of Tony Elumelu’s leadership style, he argued that leaders should remain connected to their people and understand how they feel.
UBA has also invested heavily in developing young employees. BEA recently examined why Elumelu continues to put young Africans at the centre of UBA’s talent pipeline. The 2026 GMAP cohort alone included 720 young professionals from nine African countries.
How those young employees interact with senior leadership is therefore more than a question of etiquette. It is part of the culture UBA is building.
When respect becomes silence
The argument for cultural sensitivity has limits.
“Respect” can easily become another name for obedience.
Many Nigerian offices are full of titles and deference. Junior employees learn quickly how to speak to senior people and which views are safer left unspoken.
Such organisations can still be badly managed.
Excessive deference creates distance between executives and what is happening inside their companies. Bad news gets softened on its way upwards. Poor decisions last longer because questioning the person who made them carries personal risk.
The 2005 meeting described by Adeniyi is useful for this reason.
Whether the executives called Elumelu Tony was secondary.
They could disagree with him.
That is the part of a flatter workplace worth protecting.
