Lessons from Bob Collymore: Review your Spendings on Weddings and Burials

The late Bob Collymore (RIP) has been cremated just one day after his death. The final rites were private, simple and certainly cheap. I also recall that he also held a private, simple and cheap wedding. But this is one of the richest guys that Kenya had around. If there is anything that poor Kenyans, like myself, should learn is the need to (re)think the amount of investment we commit to wedding and funeral ceremonies. Take a moment to reflect about just how much you contribute to such events like weddings and funerals and think about how much of it is actually totally unnecessary e.g. having to keep a body in the mortuary for days and weeks where it accumulates bills, transporting it to rural homes and holding huge funeral gatherings; having convoys of top of the range cars during weddings, spending a fortune on wedding clothes including gowns which the pride will only wear for few hours etc. Do not mention culture to me because I also know that, we have separately largely agreed that some cultural practices, e.g. Female Gender Mutilation (FGM), are actually backward and should be dropped already. If this logic holds then spending huge sums of money on funeral and wedding ceremonies especially if and when we cannot afford it are equally backward cultural practices which we should start thinking how to drop.