‎By Oluwatobiloba Gideon Oludayomi

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‎My wife and I were talking the other night, and the conversation drifted, as it often does, to a video making the rounds online. A young graduate at a UBA event stood up to address the Chairman, Tony Elumelu, and called him by his first name. He corrected her, gently but firmly, and told her to call him Mr Elumelu, or TOE, or Chairman. She adjusted. The clip went viral. And Nigeria, as Nigeria does, split into two camps.

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‎I sat with that video for a while before I said anything. Not because I did not have an opinion, I did. But because I have learned that my first assignment is never to judge. It is to understand. And once you understand, you often find that the thing everyone is arguing about on the surface is not really the thing at all.

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‎So let me ask the question my wife and I kept circling back to. How did we get here. How did common courtesy become something we now have to debate.

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‎I read English and Literary Studies in school, so permit me to bring in a small technical word, sociolinguistics. It simply means that language does not exist on its own, it carries the fingerprints of culture, class, age, and relationship. The words you are permitted to use with someone are never just about grammar. They are about the bond that exists, or does not exist, between you and that person. Nobody walks into a company on their first day and starts calling the managing director by their first name, not because there is a written law against it, but because sense itself teaches you that titles are earned access points, not default settings.

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‎That is exactly what played out with Tony Elumelu. By every standard, he and that young lady are not friends. There was no shared history, no invitation extended, no bond that had been built over time. Calling him Tony was not confidence, it was assumption. And assumption, when it walks into a space it has not been invited into, is what we used to simply call disrespect before we started giving it softer names.

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‎I understand the argument some people are making. They say the world has changed, that first name culture is now normal in many corporate spaces, that respect should not be tied to titles. I do not dismiss that argument, it has some truth in it. But truth having some weight does not mean it has all the weight. Because the same people who casually call their Nigerian bosses by first name would never dream of doing the same to certain elders in their own family, no matter how modern they claim to be. That tells you something. It tells you the issue was never really about first names. It was about permission, and about who decides when that permission is given.

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‎I feel strongly about this because I live it. My name is Oluwatobiloba, and many people naturally shorten it to Tobi. I never correct them harshly, but I will always prefer that you use the full name I was given, regardless of your age or status. And if you must call me Gideon, that name carries a Mr in front of it for anyone outside my family. This is not pride. It is simply an understanding that names are sacred things, and how a name is used says something about the relationship behind it.

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‎Scripture actually settles this matter far more clearly than social media ever will. Leviticus 19:32 in the Good News Translation says, stand up in the presence of the aged, and show respect for old people and honor me. I am the Lord. Respect, in the Bible, was never presented as optional or old fashioned. It was presented as a reflection of how seriously you take order itself. Romans 13:7 in the NLT puts it even more plainly, give to everyone what you owe them, obedience, respect, and honor to all to whom it is due.

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‎Here is what troubles me the most about this whole conversation though. It is not really about Tony Elumelu. It is about what our comment sections have revealed about the quality of reasoning we now carry as a people. A lot of the responses I read were not thinking, they were reacting. And reaction, without reflection, is how a nation slowly loses its ability to tell the difference between confidence and carelessness.

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‎Because when a culture is imported without understanding, it is always abused before it is properly used. That is not just true of first name culture, it is true of almost everything we borrow without first asking why it worked where it came from.

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‎Common sense used to be common. Now it is something we have to explain, defend, and sometimes even apologise for teaching. That should bother all of us far more than one viral video ever could.

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‎I do not write this to condemn the young lady, or to canonise Tony Elumelu. I write it because somewhere between the video and the comments, we are being shown a mirror. And the wise thing to do with a mirror is not to argue with it. It is to look, and to adjust what needs adjusting.

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‎What do you think. Was Tony Elumelu right to correct her publicly, or has our idea of respect simply refused to evolve with the times. I would love to read your thoughts below.

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‎Oluwatobiloba Gideon Oludayomi is a life coach, a practical writer, a scripture addict, and a versatile entrepreneur creating wealth solutions through agriculture, real estate, and enterprise. He is the Visioneer of Ambassadors for Christ Intercessory Missions, a ministry mandated to raise a conscious generation and new covenant priests who will be a sweet savour unto God and humanity, a place of both spiritual formation and social impact. He is the Convener of the Dominion Guild Network, an ecosystem of high value individuals, young and determined to becoming an empowered generation. He is the author of "Build It to Last", "I Thought I Married a Wife" (a novel), and "Practical Love."

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