Yvonne Ebbi Takes Etiquette Book on School Tour 

Yinka Olatunbosun

Yvonne Ebbi, author of My Little Book of Etiquette has revealed plans to distribute about one million of her books to both public primary and secondary schools in Lagos State starting from May. 

 Aside from donating books to the schools, she would engage the students through a series of seminars where they would be taught good manners. The focus of this book tour and donation is to build the culture of courtesy, the culture of civility in schools, churches and mosques.

 “We will have seminars with the children on manners, we will make it very child-friendly,’’ she began. “Some of them don’t have any idea of what manners entails, but we will bring them to the known so that we can have a civil society. Some of the youths misbehaving today are from homes, if the homes had insisted on manners and cultures we wouldn’t be where we are today.

 “I am not saying we should throw away our Africanism. I am saying within the confines of our culture, we have what is called decency. We don’t want to just let the young people just do what they want to do, we want to be able to guide them with principles, rules, and policies. We will go to other states eventually but we will start from Lagos state.”

 Colourful and children-friendly, the 47-page book harped on good manners and etiquettes that fosters the true African cultures and values which the author said are fast eroding especially among young people. 

Ebbi who also runs an advocacy group on social civility, ‘IFitness’ explained that the planned project on Social Etiquettes in Lagos Schools was to instill a culture of civility and decorum in both the teachers and students. 

 She maintained that young people have failed to imbibe the rich African culture of respect, civility and other moral standards hence the need to reinforce the value system back in the society. 

 “With IFiness project, the whole idea is to rebuild the value system. Looking at the way our girls carry about in prostitution, I realised I have a lot to do in teaching our youths the value of contentment. We want to revive the value system. 

 “We want to donate the books as our own corporate social responsibility. We will train the teachers so that they will be able to reinforce the value system. We want practical ways to help our children to be better behaved in hygiene, culture in social etiquettes, associations. We want them to know that moral values are part of life,” Ebbi stated.