Lagos — At a recent dinner in Abuja the host, a senator, introduced me to the Speaker from one of the State Assemblies. He said: This is the Right Honourable , Speaker of the House of Assembly of We shook hands.

In between sips of pre-dinner drinks, I pondered on the Speaker's honorific prefix. I found myself wondering what was right about Right Honourable as a title for a politician in independent Nigeria that is approaching fifty years of nationhood.

To be sure, it was not the first time I had heard someone referred to as Right Honourable. I recall that in recent times it was the late, truly Distinguished Senator Chuba Okadigbo, who was first addressed as such. I am not quite sure whether Okadigbo awarded himself the title or it was thrust upon him by his many adoring political acolytes who might have felt that His Excellency the President of the Senate was not enough. In fact Speakers of the House of Representatives and even their deputies have been addressed by this strange moniker. This was, however, my first inkling that State Assembly Speakers had also appropriated the title.

But what is more to the point here is the origin of this honorific title and who truly can be addressed as such.

Historically the title derives from membership of the Privy Council of England, now known as Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council. Its origin is embedded in the ancient traditions of medieval England, and its members are appointed by the British monarch. They are drawn almost exclusively from the very high ranks of the British Government, mainly senior cabinet members, beginning from the Prime Minister.

As head the Commonwealth, the British monarch also extends the honour to Prime Ministers and Governors-General of those Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who still recognize the Queen as their honorary head of state. It is only these members of the Council who can be rightly addressed as Right Honourable. Officially the Council advises the British Sovereign on the exercise of the Royal Prerogatives, and issues executive orders known as Orders-in-Council. The Council was also once the court of last resort for Commonwealth countries.

To the best of my knowledge there were only two Nigerian politicians who were appointed to the Privy Council and therefore properly earned the title of Right Honourable: the late Dr Nnamdi Azikwe and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, then Governor-General, later President, and Prime Minister respectively of the Federal Republic. But with Nigeria becoming a Republic in 1963, the honour was discarded, along with other British colonial honours.

The question then is: how come, after forty-six years of republican nationhood, we have relapsed into a colonial honorific which, to the best of my knowledge, does not derive from any known official, legal or constitutional instrument of the Federal Republic? I believe the answer lies not merely in the well-known Nigerian love for hyperbolic titles but also in our tendency not recognize the difference between work and ceremony, between title and duty, between power-play, power and performance; between shadow and substance. Very often what we call ourselves may have no bearing whatsoever on what type of work we do, or whether we do it with any sense of dedication and competence. It is all in the title.

I must also recognize that ours is an anything-goes- society where things are done without reason or rhyme, and impunity is a political way of life.

In a nation where a Mohammed Abacha [!] can have the brazen effrontery to declare his intention to run for governor of Kano State [and may even win!]; where Keke NAPEP is touted as a sign of progress, and where you can build a six-storey hotel without an elevator, anyone can wake up in the morning, clear his throat and award himself the title of Emperor. As a matter of fact I recall that General Jeremiah Useni felt that the title of Minister of Federal Capital Territory did not sufficiently reflect his high office and was widely called The Emperor of Abuja.

Nowadays, the fact that one is His Excellency the Governor of a State is no longer enough. He has to be Executive Governor; which begs the question: do we have ceremonial governors? Even the local government chairman, whose achievements you put on the back of a postage stamp, is called Executive Chairman. Presumably it is only a matter of time before he is called Right Honourable Executive Chairman. But that is not as laughable as the fact that an ex-Senator who becomes a governor or minister is still addressed as His Excellency the Executive Governor of Senator Or the Honourable Minister of . Senator .

We have the absurd practice whereby senators no longer call their own colleagues, with whom they have worked amicably for years, by their names but Distinguished. I would not be surprised if their wives were also required to address their husbands in the same way, even in the privacy of their bedrooms, and even if they have not distinguished themselves in their boudoir!

The Church, the advocate of modesty, has not inoculated itself against the virus of titlemania. Knights of the Catholic and Anglican churches now address themselves as Sir, and their wives are Lady or Dame, an ego trip that their counterparts in other countries do not indulge in.

I have searched hard to determine the origin of this outlandish proclivity. The British from whom we borrowed our earlier political system may be the culprit. But titles, much as they are in abundance in British society, are not appropriated arbitrarily. They often go with clearly quantifiable achievements. America, the custodian of our current political system, does not offer much insight, either. Indeed it was only at the inauguration of Barak Obama last January that I realized that the US president, arguably the most powerful man in the world, is simply the Honourable; and although he commands the most powerful military on the planet, there was no reference to him as the Commander-in-chief of the US Armed Forces.

I recognize that we in the media have helped perpetuate the oddity of preposterous titles. I recall, of course, that when we started The Guardian newspaper more than twenty-five years ago, we tried to bring about a change in the culture of ridiculous titles through the Simply Mister policy. Admittedly the policy was abandoned in the face of stiff opposition from the Nigerian elite. But that does not excuse a news organ to describe a governor by both his previous and current titles. His Excellency-Governor-Senator-Chief is an aberration which no editor should tolerate.

In the final analysis, whatever title and honorific we award ourselves is no substitute for work, probity, performance and accomplishment by and for which any true public officer should be judged and honoured. For while ceremonial titles and honorifics are on profuse display we cannot truly say the same about work. In a nation in dire need of hard and qualitative work, in need of moving forward, we cannot hide our parlous state of affairs under the finery of titles. Our national destination of 2020 is literally ten short years away. While other, smaller nations in the United Arabic Emirates, with even longer-term targets [2030] are already putting down markers and practical milestones in fulfillment of their objectives, we are still at the committee stage.

And we do not appear to be doing a particularly decent job of it. You can ask the Minister of National Planning, Dr Shamsudeen Usman. But let me just add that as I was typing this particular paragraph, reality made its contribution - there was a power cut, the third before nine o'clock in the morning!

Allow me to end this by inviting Dr Abubakar Momoh, a political scientist, who recently x-rayed our performance as a nation. In a newspaper interview Dr Momoh had a lot to say about some of the tasks that our title bearers have left undone and do not even want to hear about. He said, inter alia: "Nobody is talking about what will happen to the people tomorrow; about illiteracy, about infant and maternal mortality, about unemployment, housing, the state of the health and education services manpower development and how to put Nigeria among the committee of nations This is not the kind of disposition and political attitude that is going to lead Nigeria to being the so-called Giant of Africa."

No, Doc. We are talking about all these things, and more. It is the doing that has continued to elude us.