Gaborone entrepreneur`s living example of why death pays

It was cold in Gaborone, Botswana one December morning of '97. It was a Saturday, which meant the day was non-working, and it was taboo to talk work in that poor little, rich city tucked away in deep Africa.

The locals headed off for their cattle farms post-lunch on Friday, ostensibly to ‘beat the traffic’; and hell hath no fury if anyone suggested that the smartest way to beat the traffic may, perhaps, be to leave later rather than earlier.

After diamonds, beef was Botswana’s biggest export and this was possible because week-day civil servants became week-end ranch owners, tending to their cattle and letting them graze in the dry Savannah with no artificial enrichment to make them fatter or fleshier. This made the meat lean and allowed Botswana beef to carry the status that it did; much before mad cow disease and many other international protocols put paid to such free-range cattle being allowed to reach Western tables without their certificate of origins next to them!

Thus, on a Friday, the expatriates dutifully headed to the nearest watering holes post-lunch, aptly named the Bull & Bush or Roland’s Rendezvous. There was even the ubiquitous Annie’s which promised the nostalgic Poms their fish and chips rolled in the weekend newspaper to add flavour, albeit not quite that of the Sunday Times! The more energetic of the expats and the younger locals (who were more urban than their older cousins) headed to the small Gaborone Golf Course and teed off, postponing their date with beers and wines till evening.

Drinking laws were lax and drink-and-drive laws did not exist. So, for the merrymakers, driving home in the middle of the night or early hours after guzzling alcohol was not a problem. On late Friday evenings, if you were on the road you were there at your own peril and come Saturday mornings you would see cars parked on top of traffic circles or simply smashed by the roadside with their owners possibly in emergency wards.

It was on one of those typical Saturdays in the winter month of July that I ventured out to the Gaborone Sun Hotel, a colonial edifice in the middle of town, to meet an entrepreneur to discuss his project.

I had first met him many years ago at a party with his then girlfriend (and now wife). He had mentioned he was looking to set up a coffin manufacturing business. I was young and heard him, mesmerized by his idea that planned to tie up the funeral parlour business his girlfriend ran and his coffin-manufacturing venture to make it a “one-stop” (no pun intended) trip to heaven.

Simple -- you die; they take care of everything.

To give a choice in death, he offered to design the coffins and make sure customers could approve them - even lie in them to make sure of the fit - before they paid and then came back into them for that final journey. So, in true Pharaoh fashion, young and old alike flocked to him to have their coffins made in their lifetimes.

By the time we met again at the Gaborone Sun Hotel that cold Saturday morning in December, he had prospered and made his coffin making-cum-funeral parlour concept into a full-fledged business offering the whole package from burial grounds, coffin design and manufacture, dressing the body, informing relatives and arranging the wake, the church service and the post-funeral party.

Funerals are big affairs in Africa and he made them bigger, more slick and better organised.

My meeting with him was at the behest of a colleague who ran the local life insurance business of the group for which we both worked. Apparently the time had come for this death business to come alive in more ways than one.

The entrepreneur and his wife discovered during their journey that reaching out to people and encouraging them to plan for their death needed reach and branding. In other words, if you wanted to make money out of funerals, you needed to get people to sign up while they still could. But the interesting thing was that while people had no problems taking out life insurance, they seemed to have a major problem paying for their own funeral, quite literally.

So our enterprising colleague in the life company saw a light in this. He told me that this funeral business, which they had provided with debt funding anyway, was now ripe for bigger pickings.

His idea was that the entire funeral ‘cover’ (his words, not mine, but no doubt influenced, I suppose, by the fact that you do get a lot of covering when you are laid into the ground one final time) needed to be now sold as an insurance policy and not as a service payment.

It instantly opened up a few things and came alive in its potential as a ‘drop dead` good idea. •    It allowed the policy holder to actually have a written policy from a well branded and well regulated insurer whom he could trust and, therefore, believe that while his siblings and children might squabble over what he had left behind, the insurance company would make absolutely sure he was buried well to rest in peace.
•    It allowed our entrepreneur friend to market his services under the auspices of a life banner and not be seen as morbid or deathly in his overtures to obtain live clients.
•    It allowed the life company to price the risk through its mortality tables and actuarial charts thereby accurately predicting how much premium the client had to pay over his expected lifetime to pay for his assured death in due course.
•    The credit risk was taken away for my poor friend and he could focus on delivering the final package without worrying about earthly matters around whether or not there might be a life after death.
•    And the existing life agents and brokers made sure they worked themselves to death to penetrate the interiors and sell those policies.

Thus gave rise the concept of insurance cover principally so as not to pay a cheque on your death but as a service instead - underwritten by a duly regulated, well-governed, highly overseen life insurance company and the service rendered by a husband-wife team making sure the last rites were carried out as they should be.

Funeral policies have existed for years, just as marriage expense policies have become the norm in India. This made sure that the final mile was delivered - on a hearse, but supported by a team whose sole business was to make that final journey a good one.

Perhaps a case for marriage event managers to start calling the insurance companies and create a similar set up for marriage policies in INDIA?

This little, ‘not so dead’ business prospers today, operates in more than one country and has served the needs of a population hungry to have a dignified death.

A dead idea it certainly wasn’t as events proved, nor was the cover provided capable of being shaken or misappropriated by greedy relatives.

Horses for courses and yet another simple idea creating a big business and serving the very essence of humanity - the right to die in peace.

The sheer beauty of the idea was its simplicity and its ability to reach young, old, rich and poor- all alike in death and insured while alive!

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.