Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

May be you might get in next life- above coffins from Ghana- but can Ghanaians afford such splendid funerals?

In Ghana the funereal send-off is as important as the life itself. But the costs, borne by extended families, can be punitive. Some 45% live on less than $1 a day, 79% on less than $2. Yet funerals tend to cost between $2,000 and $3,500. “Money measures the quality of the funeral and the family,” says Sjaak van der Geest, an anthropologist. The more cash spent, the higher the reputation of the deceased and the family. Mr Okai died in hospital, then spent almost three months in the morgue, at a cost of $521: the longer your body is in the fridge, the more prestigious. The Ga king, recently buried in Accra, was on ice for 18 months; the Dagbon king, in northern Ghana, for a record four years.

Mr Okai's house was repainted for the wake. His coffin cost $319, two-thirds of the average Ghanaian's annual income. Posters announcing the funeral were printed and distributed around town, beer and soft drinks bought, food prepared, the band hired, T-shirts bearing Mr Okai's picture printed, transport for mourners arranged, diesel generators rented and cameramen brought in to record the day. A funeral arranger, Joseph Akrashie Annan, reckons that $2,470 was spent sending Mr Okai to his grave.

In the 1980s Ghana's then military ruler, Jerry Rawlings, set up a commission to look at the exorbitant costs of funerals amid fears they were retarding the country's economic growth. “Every year funerals grow in size, pomp and pageantry,” says Edward Kutsoati, a Ghanaian economist at Tufts University in the United States. “They are becoming centre-stage in the life of Ghanaians. This is not an efficient allocation of resources