African families can mobilise remarkable resources for a funeral. The uncomfortable question is why so few of us mobilise the same devotion for the fruit bowl, the health screening, or the walk that might have postponed it.The Funeral Is Not the Problem, Our Priorities Might BeThere are few occasions in African communal life as emotionally powerful as a funeral. When death visits, families gather from considerable distances, friends contribute without being asked, and communities organise with a discipline that would impress any project manager. Food is prepared, chairs appear in their hundreds, and grief is transformed into collective remembrance. African funerals rightly remind us that no human being should disappear as though they never mattered.The argument here is not against funerals. It is against an uncomfortable contradiction, captured in a NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) reflection: in many African homes, there is always money for funerals but too little for fruit and vegetables. The line is deliberately provocative, since healthy food can genuinely be unaffordable or inaccessible, and the World Health Organisation estimates that around three billion people globally cannot access safe, nutritious and sufficient food. But beneath the exaggeration sits a serious question. Why are human beings sometimes better at mobilising resources after preventable illness and death than before them? As NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) puts it, there is dignity in honouring the dead, but perhaps even greater wisdom in investing early enough to postpone the funeral. That is not disrespect. It is simply love translated into prevention.The Statistics Are Already KnockingAfrica is undergoing a profound health transition. In the year two thousand, noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory illness accounted for roughly a quarter of deaths across the World Health Organisation’s African Region. By 2019, that figure had climbed to thirty-seven per cent. In Ghana, the warning is more immediate still, with the World Health Organisation reporting in 2025 that noncommunicable diseases are now responsible for nearly half of all deaths in the country. These are not abstract numbers. They are fathers, mothers, teachers, traders and executives, increasingly dying earlier than they should. Globally, noncommunicable diseases now account for nearly three quarters of all deaths, with low- and middle-income countries bearing a disproportionate share of that burden.Diet is only one part of this picture, alongside genetics, tobacco, alcohol, air pollution and inactivity, yet it remains a significant and modifiable risk factor. The World Health Organisation recommends that adults and children over ten consume at least four hundred grams of fruit and vegetables daily, and has estimated that inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption was associated with roughly three point nine million deaths worldwide in 2017. Suddenly, the fruit bowl looks considerably less decorative than we once assumed.We Have Become Experts at Responding After the FactPerhaps our deeper challenge is that we are often more responsive than preventive. Someone becomes seriously ill, and money is mobilised within hours. A hospital bill arrives, and family WhatsApp groups awaken with impressive efficiency, reuniting relatives who have not spoken since the last family disagreement. Then, tragically, if treatment fails, another round of mobilisation begins, this time for the funeral. There is a certain gentle humour in our capacity to assemble ourselves magnificently only once circumstances have become irreversible, and the family meeting that could never agree on funding an annual medical screening can become astonishingly united when choosing funeral cloth. One may smile at that. One should then become rather quiet.As NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) reminds us, we should not become so organised around mourning that we remain disorganised around prevention. This pattern is not uniquely African. Human beings everywhere discount distant risks and react more strongly to immediate events, and prevention is psychologically difficult precisely because its greatest success is something that never happens. Nobody throws a party because hypertension was detected early, and no newspaper announces that a daily walk quietly added years to somebody’s life. Prevention, in this sense, suffers from its own success. It is invisible.Poverty Cannot Be Lectured AwayIt would be profoundly unfair, however, to tell a low-income household to buy more vegetables while ignoring the economics surrounding food. Healthy eating is not merely a matter of personal discipline, and the World Health Organisation recognises that nutritious diets can be inaccessible, particularly in food-insecure communities. Rapid urbanisation, alongside the aggressive marketing of highly processed foods, has shifted diets towards products heavy in salt, sugar and unhealthy fats. The mother choosing inexpensive, calorie-dense food to feed several children is therefore not necessarily uninformed. She may instead be making a rational economic decision within a system that has made the unhealthy plate cheaper than the healthy one.This changes the policy conversation considerably. If African governments want healthier citizens, they must help build healthier food systems, since agriculture cannot be separated from healthcare, and school feeding cannot be separated from long-term public health. What we grow, process, transport, advertise and sell forms one enormous health supply chain. As NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) cautions, we should not lecture the household about the healthy plate while designing an economy that makes the unhealthy plate cheaper. Individual responsibility must meet institutional responsibility somewhere in the middle, and at present, it rarely does.A Continent That Grows Food Should Not Struggle to Eat WellHere lies another contradiction. Africa possesses considerable agricultural potential, from Ghana’s pineapples, tomatoes and leafy vegetables to the substantial agricultural capability found across Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa. Yet post-harvest losses, inadequate cold chains and fragmented logistics routinely make nutritious food unnecessarily expensive or altogether unavailable. This is not merely an agricultural failure. It is a public health failure wearing an agricultural disguise.Imagine treating investment in cold storage as preventive healthcare, or municipalities deliberately protecting fresh food markets the way they protect hospitals. Imagine schools teaching children to grow vegetables alongside mathematics, and agricultural policy measuring not only tonnes produced but whether citizens can actually afford a nutritious diet. Japan has long embedded diet and health awareness into everyday culture, and Nordic countries use school meals as public health policy. Africa need not copy either, but we might usefully borrow the underlying principle that health is produced long before anybody enters a hospital.The Home Is the First Ministry of HealthGovernment cannot do everything, and the most consequential public health institution may in fact be the household. Children learn at home what to eat, whether water or sugary drinks are normal, and whether physical activity is naturally part of life. The World Health Organisation notes that dietary behaviours established during childhood frequently continue into adulthood, which should change how parents view the family table. A child who grows up seeing fruit as ordinary rather than occasional is receiving preventive healthcare without ever knowing it.As NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) observes, the home is the first hospital, the kitchen its first pharmacy, and daily habits often write prescriptions years before any doctor does. This is not a claim that food replaces medicine, for it plainly does not. Instead, it is a reminder that lifestyle is itself a part of health, quietly accumulating for decades before any diagnosis names it.What If We Invested in Life as Generously as We Invest in FarewellPicture a modest cultural shift, not towards smaller love for the dead, but towards greater investment in the living. Family associations that already mobilise magnificently during funerals could just as easily encourage annual health screening. Churches, mosques, traditional authorities and community organisations could make prevention part of their social responsibility, while employers strengthen workplace wellness and schools normalise nutrition literacy. Governments can use regulation, labelling and carefully designed fiscal measures to make the healthier choice the easier one, tools the World Health Organisation itself recommends. Agricultural policy should encourage diversified, nutritious local production, and health systems must expand early detection of hypertension, diabetes and related risks. Households with the means might reasonably consider preventive health expenditure as seriously as they already consider ceremony. The objective is not immortality, since every life ends. The objective is simply avoiding the deaths that arrive unnecessarily early.What Is Wrong With Us?Perhaps the answer lies partly in what we make visible. Funerals are public, while prevention is private. A magnificent funeral is seen by hundreds, while a plate of vegetables receives no applause whatsoever. A beautiful coffin is visible, while controlled blood pressure is not; a convoy attracts attention in a way that twenty years of quietly added healthier choices never could. We may simply have confused visibility with value. This is not an argument for abandoning tradition, for African societies should rightly preserve the solidarity and dignity that surround death. It is an invitation to transfer some of that same extraordinary solidarity towards life: checking on relatives before they become patients, and contributing to screening before contributing to hospital bills. Consider celebrating a seventy-fifth birthday with even greater enthusiasm than the funeral that might otherwise have arrived at fifty-five. That would be cultural progress without any cultural abandonment.As NyansaKasa (words of wisdom) reflects, tradition becomes stronger, not weaker, when wisdom allows it to protect tomorrow as beautifully as it honours yesterday. Healthcare does not begin when illness arrives. It begins with food systems, education, sanitation, screening and household choices made quietly, years in advance. Africa cannot hospitalise its way out of every preventable disease, and no family should have to mourn what earlier intervention might have delayed or prevented. So let us honour our dead, gather, remember, and comfort families as we always have. But while we are together, perhaps we might also ask whether the greatest tribute to those who have gone is helping those still here to live rather longer. The funeral will eventually come for every one of us. There is no need, out of habit or neglect, to send it an early invitation.About the AuthorIng. Professor Douglas K. Boateng is a strategist in governance, industrialisation and supply chains, and serves as a professional chairperson, an international Chartered Director (UK) and a Chartered Engineer (UK). A Pan-Africanist and social entrepreneur at heart, he has spent his career working across public institutions, corporate boards and industrial policy, in Africa and beyond, guided by the conviction that strong institutions are built one honest decision at a time. His contributions to industry and academia have earned him more than six lifetime achievement awards throughout his career. He is the founder of NyansaKasa, Words of Wisdom, a collection of daily aphorisms he has written and shared since late 2019, distilling decades of experience advising governments, boards, and enterprises on governance, accountability, and institutional resilience into words meant to challenge and endure. He convenes the Boardroom Governance Summit, Africa’s largest boardroom-focused summit, and writes a widely read op-ed series titled “Inconvenient Truth” and “What Is Wrong With Us,” featured on some of the region’s leading digital media platforms. Professor Boateng can be reached via LinkedIn or at info@panavest.com.