By Tola
In these parts, death is taken as seriously as life;sometime even more so. Indeed, in Africa the style in which you bury your dead especially one’s parents is a measure of your stature as a man or woman of means, and is a testament to how well (or not) the dead have raised their children. It’s a paradox.

There are incidents told of how some individuals die in penury,completely ignored and neglected by relatives, only to be given a statesman’s burial! What is the point I say? Was the burial truly in honour of that person, or was it just another multi-million ego massaging event designed to ‘boost’ the social standing of the living?Perhaps that’s why people are not taking chances and are taking care of the business of the ‘here after’ personally.

It is not unheard of for one to purchase one’s final resting place while one is still living. Indeed, the death is big business.

I came across a story in which it was reported that in Ghana, people are snapping up tombs like hot cakes. And not just in private cemeteries and vaults but also in public burial spaces. Ghana, it is reported, boasts of very well preserved public burial sites so the rich elite didn’t see anything wrong in burying their dead there —unlike here, where our rich bourgeois engineer do anything to maintain that strict divide between rich and poor.

What made this story particularly interesting for me was how it went on to say that not only were these tomb spaces going really fast but that people were actually accessing loans offered by banks in Ghana who have devised ‘special loan packages’ for the funding of funerals. Wow!

I would have thought that a loan was better acquired to finance the business of living as opposed the business of dying. No be who don chop belle full, change remain na imdey think of buying sleeping space for eternity. I strongly believe that if you have to borrow money to buy a burial spot then you are not yet ready for one.

Unless its pay as you go and you start paying it from when you are in your 20s then that’s a plan. Then what happened to the practice of giving our children the privilege (?) of burying us?

Are we inferring that we are raising children that we do not trust to do right by us? Or is the loan meant to ease their burden? What if the one who acquired the loan dies before offsetting it, who carries the can?

As absurd as it is to me though, you have to admit that it is a brilliant business plan. Recognise the aspirational desires of a people, provide the service, and what’s more provide the means to avail yourself of that service… brilliant! I have no concrete proof but I’m willing to bet good money that it was a Nigerian!