An average southerner values the life of the dead than the living. If it is not so, why do most people worry and spend more to bury the dead or even insist while alive they should be given an elaborate burial?
Village elders and youths give lists of burial rites, and on these lists are live cows and many cartons of drinks that should be given to them before the dead is buried.
Even churches are not left out of this fad. They will check their register to be sure you are up to date in paying your village or city church dues. If not, everything must be fully paid to the last penny before they can participate during the funeral.
People begin to panic at the demise of either their fathers or mothers-in-law because tradition demands that they donate a cow each as part of the burial rite. This is when you will see a family that can barely feed looking for money to buy cow. What a tradition!
When you go to many hospitals, you will see patients that have been abandoned by families due to lack of funds. Some of them discharge themselves and go back home because they couldn’t pay their hospital bills anymore, but once they are pronounced dead, they are kept in mortuary for months in preparation for a ‘befitting burial.’
The bereaved are more worried about how to complete the unfinished building the deceased left behind in the village. They focus on putting up posters and billboards, placing adverts in newspapers and TV announcing the demise and burial date of the deceased.
They also rent canopies and chairs, buy assorted drinks, and cook different foods. They buy live cows, goats and chickens for the departed befitting burial but they didn’t lift a finger to help the person when he or she was still alive.
Before the burial, there will be live band and DJ’s playing loud music for at least three days non-stop with generator as source of electricity.
Family members and friends will buy and make different uniform outfit for the burial. The dead will be laid in state with an expensive casket in an overly decorated ambulance.
You will be amazed by the sharp undertakers who will be elegantly dressed showing off their choreographed dance steps with the dead on their shoulders.
At the burial, there will be show off with rented or borrowed cars on endless convoys. Some people make it a point of duty to invite highly placed government officials to the burial just to show off.
Some family members will hire soldiers and police men to stand guard all over the premises of the burial ceremony. They even give out expensive souvenirs with the deceased face printed on them.
At least, you know some people who could barely feed while they were alive given such burial and family members brag about how they gave them a befitting burial.
It is sad that some families incur debt and practically become beggars just because they lost a loved one who they must give a befitting burial.
We are in trouble in Africa. You have never slept on a bed worth N50, 000 while alive but will be buried in a coffin worth half a million after death.
You couldn’t afford three square meals while alive, but they are spending so much burying your corpse. Isn’t that madness to enjoy the luxury you didn’t enjoy while alive? It is a big shame indeed!
You spend everything your loved one had to give him a befitting burial and forget that there is an unplanned future ahead for his immediate family.
What exactly is a befitting burial? Is it the cost of the casket, the assorted food and drinks, the elaborate party, VIPs gracing the funeral, aso- ebi (uniform), millions of naira budgeted and wasted within days? What really is befitting about burying the dead?
The dead is dead and gone. It’s just the body that needs to be decently laid 6 feet beneath the earth surrounded by loved ones paying their last respect.
All these elaborate ceremonies are just nothing but misplaced priority and eye service. If many of the dead had access to just 5% of what is expended to bury them while alive, they would have lived a more befitting life.
Anyone that will spend more money on your funeral than they ever did while you were alive, need his or her brain re-wired.
People can do something unique in memory of the dead, award scholarships to the needy, build schools, construct roads or even a hospital in memory of a dead loved one.
To me, that will be a befitting burial, not wasting money on food, drinks and show-off for a few days.
Justifying such wastefulness and eye service as culture shows how shallow most of us are. Culture is dynamic. It evolves and goes through constant modification. Having an elaborate burial is a waste of time and resources especially if the person lived and died poor.
We should stop taking pride in trivial things. In other climes, such funds will be donated to research institutes to help combat diseases or provide free health care services to communities who cannot afford such.
Africans are full time beneficiaries of most of these foundations in memory of deceased, yet we have refused to evolve and modify our wasteful culture.
If you still brag about giving your parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents or whoever a befitting burial of wastefulness after reading this, then shame on you!