Ability to bury our dead at home is now a measure of affluence, riches or wealth in Kabba. Inability to follow this trend is now seen as shameful or high level of poverty.
You are yet to arrive if you do not bury the dead relative at home even when the person died in penury and lack of care of an aliment the person had.
The permit to bury at home costs as much as 150,000 Naira, we are told, just to discourage people as much as possible. Yet, people will rather prefer to take loan to pay to avoid shame, they would say.
Sad enough, it is of note that such revenue so generated goes to the state government and not to the local government. I am aware of at least three developed landed properties in the GRA that are abandoned now because the owners were buried on the sites. The spouses and children left behind could not afford to be seeing the burial site of their loved ones. What a colossal lost.
Many of such properties abound in town and people still feel indifferent.
There was a case of a tenant that died with a debt of three months house rent. The children completed a house within 3 months for use during the burial ceremony and to bury their mother. Today, the house is empty.
Now, which is more important; house for the dead or the living?
In the same vein, the street is littered with billboards or flex banners carrying obituary adverts that are left behind after burial ceremonies, some for up to five years after the ceremony. Are obituary boards what we should decorate our streets with? Why are we getting our priorities wrong? The belief of our fore fathers (Owe Tano) was that the dead to sleep with the dead and the living to live peacefully with those alive and be taken good care of. The dead, either poor or rich would end up in the same street; Odogo.
We remember the great icon, Alhasan Dare, the Dangote of their time, whose name was used to measure wealth; ‘wo bale newo re Alhasan maje labe re’, meaning, even if you are as rich as Alhasan you do not feed me. He built the first story building and we had just two of its type then in the whole of Nigeria. Alhasan died, he was not buried in his house. Same for Madam Charity, Pa Olorunleke, Pa Odano and of course my father, Pa Matthew Oke. They are resting at Odogo.
Mighty Pa Jethro Adebola who led the campaign against burying the dead at home must be weeping in his grave for his town that he spent time to labour for now turned into another thing. Then he would say, don’t bury the dead at home so as not to pollute our well. Today, almost every house has a well and we are now putting burial ground side by side.
My take, and plead; let us work at modernizing our Odogo, expand the place and make the place very much habitable as our last resting place, while we equally keep our town free of roving spirits.
Owe a gbe gha.
– Simon Oke
