Rachael Olokungboye
OWO – Toyyib Musa-Omoloja, a lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, Rufus Giwa Polytechnic, Owo, Ondo State, on Saturday decried profligacy associated with funerals in Nigeria.
“The profligacy and ostentation that have crept into funerals in Nigeria have no bearing with lofty logical human reasoning.
“Whether the dead will rest in peace or not is never a function of the grandiosity of the funeral,’’ he said in Akure.
He stressed that the quality of life lived by the deceased, his or her good or bad deeds would determine the dead’s final destination.
Musa-Omoloja said the rate at which family members spent hundreds of millions of naira to organize funerals to meet peoples’ expectations about “befitting funerals’’ had compromised the general wellbeing and mental health of many.
“Many go through anxieties, depression, and other health challenges in their desire to be part of the fad of giving `befitting burials’ to their departed relatives,’’ he said.’
He noted that the elaborate funeral practices had become a farce dogged also by hypocrisy and contradictions.
“Elaborate and ostentatious funerals are consumptive rather than productive economic ventures injurious to healthy societal norms.
“In the olden days, in some cultures, the Yoruba in particular, only the elderly were gifted with funerals which could be considered as a celebration of a life well-lived.
“These days, the unraveling of the moral fiber is so pronounced that the age and status of the deceased are no longer important when planning the profligate funerals,’’ Musa-Omoloja said.
