Purchasing Death

You have obviously encountered them in your working life; sharply dressed and very eloquent. Sometimes with the beating of weather showing right through their eyes, but always gritty, determined, hopeful. They are the real manifestation of stoic, philosophical, never-say-die embodiment. They come referred or pointed out; having started their careers from the ‘known’ of a friend or relative or former classmate, who would not buy what they were selling but was happy enough to pass them on – dump them actually – to you the unsuspecting acquaintance. Good riddance. Or sometimes in an office setting, where you were pointed out as a possible lead when they ambushed your workmate who does not stomach their products or was just not an ideal prospect…

Welcome to Selling Life Insurance in Africa

There isn’t a legit industry as vilified on the continent as the Life Insurance industry. Is it because children of mankind’s cradle don’t like facing up to their own mortality and therefore cannot discuss death? Are cases of misrepresentation so high that no insurance agent cannot be trusted? Is it the underwriters that are simply profit-takers? Reasons for low life insurance penetration are a dime a dozen - low knowledge and lack of awareness, we perceive insurance negatively due to historical reasons, insurers offer poor service with some being run like personal family property, cultural and religious beliefs around death, cumbersome claims procedures, poor marketing strategies, lack of savings culture, low returns as compared to other investment options, fraud and dishonesty among both the insured and insurers, poorly structured products, ad infinitum. 

As a partaker and former practitioner of the life insurance trade, I know how hard agents work to sell a single policy and the struggles they go through thereafter to get the policy accepted and underwritten as well as kept in force at least until it attains some cash surrender value. I also have a functional grasp of why during hard times like job loss or financial turbulence, the monthly life insurance premium is the first ‘expense’ to be forfeited, even if at that point it’s the Investment needed the most. How about the dreaded medical exams on high sums assured? Shock and awe is the litany of personal internal horrors that follows the discovery of one’s terminal disease status at underwriting stage.

Life insurance is sold, not bought. What does this mean? If people understood what it does, there would be no need for sales agents; people would simply flock to underwriters. But they don’t understand insurance, so it must be sold.

One of the doyens in the industry went to the extremes of having a micro-coffin the size of a pen’s case made for him, which he carried on his key-chain on brash days, or in the inside breast-pocket of his blazer on discreet occasions. Every time he encountered the typical life insurance evader – circa 95% of people - who had just squandered 30min of the man’s time, vocabulary and saliva in trying to press home the merits of purchasing protection to no avail, he would bring out the little coffin, place it on your table and ask you in his customary high-pitched voice: 

‘Tell me Sir, when you are lying in here (tapping the miniature coffin) and your fake friends and ravenous relatives are filing past in giving you their final viewing before mumbling their sorry condolences to your grieving wife and children seated at your wrong end, tell me what I should tell your widow in regard to us having known each other but your never having taken up appropriate and secure estate-building vehicles like life insurance. Tell me what I should say to her, yet she knows that you and I know each other’

Or he would pull from his folder a laminated newspaper cutting depicting a recent fatal road accident in his typical fashion.

‘Nobody can outrun death Sir. Take for example this accident last week where this 22-wheeler lost its breaks coming down the hill and rammed 7 cars causing 19 deaths. Do you suppose the drivers of these private cars were at fault in any way? Why was it them and not you for example; any special reasons?’ Then waxing philosophy, ‘You know the gods make proud those whom they are about to destroy...’

I can’t say if he was stupendously successful with this macabre approach, but I can tell you many of us agents would receive a call out of the blues from a prospect we had been unsuccessful with before and who had encountered him, grasped the grotesque message but could not stomach buying from the guy.

Nobody likes talking about death, whether theirs or someone else’s. Yet for every one life, there is obviously a guaranteed death to come.

Let me digress a little, to medieval England. Now that we took up the language, we better learn some culture too... The ‘holding a wake’ business… In those days lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky, and the combination of the metal and the fermented stuff would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days right by the roadside as they stumbled homewards. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead, alert their kin who would prepare them for burial. Laid out most commonly on the kitchen table for a couple of days, their family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.

Fast-forward to post rigor-mortis, and England being old and small, local folks started running out of places to bury people. Custom had it that they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a bone-house so as to reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, apparently 1 out of every 25 coffins would be found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. In that medieval ingenuity, they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. In the days following internment someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift) to listen for the bell; and just like that, someone could be ‘saved by the bell’ or would be aptly considered a ‘dead ringer’.

Fun is like life insurance; the older you get, the more it costs ~ Frank McKinney Hubbard,

But what exactly is life insurance? The common misconception is that there is a particular price (premium) to be paid, and you either pay it or not. And from all our premiums the insurer does their best not to have to pay out any claim. The truth is that the underwriter assesses your health, family history, age, occupation and other factors to arrive at a cost that’s sufficient to cover your particular risk(s). Even if you are wheeled into the insurer’s office on a stretcher or death bed to complete your life insurance application, the underwriter could still make you an offer. It may not be a very attractive offer considering your dire circumstances, but it will be an offer nonetheless. You could then decide that the value being apportioned to your life is too low and look for a better deal elsewhere, or even maybe ignore the situation and take your chances.

Strangely many decide not to pay any additional premium for their less-than-average life expectancy, and completely refuse to be reasoned with by their agents. Consider the cobra charmer (thankfully not too many of these exist on the continent) who complains at being asked to pay extra premiums because his entire family has always been in the cobra charming business and none of them has ever been fatally bitten. At least not lately. Any sane person would find the mentality of obviously higher-risk individuals rather odd.

Life insurance really is a classic case of deferring gratification; the very essence of deliberately enduring short term pain (premiums, medical tests) for long term gain. Meaning it’s not necessarily for everyone, even though an insurance agent should tell you otherwise. Unlike its mandatory motor vehicle counterpart, life insurance does not make the priority list of most people. It is however extremely critical for certain profiles in society, case in point being those on the wrong side of age 45 with kids on the opposite side of 10. With a neat army of dependents and no tangible asset to your name, yet fixated enough by Africanism to want your remains interred in your ancestral hamlet.

Every breadwinner has problems that only life insurance can solve; in the young the problem is to create cash, while in the older it is to conserve it. If a child, a spouse, a life partner or a parent depends on you and your income, you need life insurance. Additionally, the only person who is guaranteed to take care of the older person you will be some day is the younger person you are today. What will replace the income-generating asset that you are today at your demise? Healthy, well-balanced children will never fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

Life Insurance was never meant to be glamorous just practical and as cold as death, especially on a continent with some of the lowest average life expectancy rates. Obviously it isn’t fair to put a value to any life, but your ability to pay the requisite premiums determines how valuable your life is. Which brings us to the questions…

Which company then? What policy? As they say in sales tracking, trust but verify. Do your own research. A good starting point would be to apply your favorite online search engine to your local insurance awards, such as www.africaninsuranceawards.org or www.thinkbusinessafrica.com/ among others; search the category in which you have most pains or doubts about - Claims settlement? Customer service? Investment Returns? It’s all there. Check out the relevant regulators too, as well as general knowledge in the public domain. Visit the insurer's website, check out their latest audited reports. Look beyond the agent's pitch to his embodiment and appearance; does he look like he really knows what a million is? But really, no reason why kith and kin have to be called into dimly lit meeting halls on some random evening on your expiry, to help fund-raise for your offspring’s education, or even for your own burial expenses. Africa’s social welfare system is run by the working class in urban centers, because the possibility of a structured welfare system is a pipe dream yet occurrences, calamities, disasters, ailments, schooling and death itself will not wait for serikali (Government). So when such a pillar dies intestate, outwardly wealthy in urban largesse but actually living in real penury, it feels like such a waste of streetsmarts, of competencies, of education, of exposure.

Do you have an updated Will and Testament? Have you bought sufficient accumulation, conservation and distribution vehicles from that reputable insurance company? Or have you left all this to your current employer to plan for you? Tomorrow that group life cover comes to an end with the termination of your services; what next? Its better to be 5 years too early than 5 minutes too late. Age escalates premiums as certain body parts start giving way and afflictions shift from risk to certainty. Millions don't have any life insurance, and that's not a crowd you want to be a part of.

Infuse considerable certainty into your days by buying some life and control today; the miniature coffin can be a terrifying sight. Make a call to that decent insurance agent, won’t you? After all, their job is to protect your family. 

The determination of life insurance salesmen to succeed has made life pretty soft for many widows. ~ William A. Feather