When our course for Entrepreneurship Development Program for Retiring Officers came to an end at the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria, ASCON, Badagry Topo, Lagos, the conclusion of one of the topics we treated that held me spellbound and set me thinking was a stark reality we are living with but which we never really pay attention to.
This was the conclusion:
"PREPARATION FOR DEATH"
"Mandatory retirement marks the end of a phase of life. It also serves as an indicator that one is nearer the grave than the period one had already spent. There is need to start to think about how to prepare for one's death."
But do we really think about death?
And as if to drive home the point, a driver that brought some NTA participants to attend the course died a day after the course had ended...
We had prayed together in the school mosque in the morning. But later when I came out to eat breakfast, I saw people standing in front of the college clinic and surrounding a bed with a dead body covered with a bedsheet.
When I enquired, I was told that he had been seen washing his vehicle in the morning. He squatted down to wash one of the tires when his life was snuffed out of him. He was found like that after a while... So sad and shocking...