The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines the word “coincidental” as “happening by chance” and “incidental” as “happening in connection with something else”.

One thing is true. Naturally and ecologically (the word that stresses that all things, living and non-living are naturally interconnected and interdependent) life and death are cyclically interconnected and interdependent.

So long as all life on our Planet Earth does not suddenly or abruptly end, the Life-and-Death cycle will continue to manifest cyclically as nothing but interconnections and interdependencies. In effect. Life needs death and death needs death and their needs are to be sought in the Life-and- Death Cycle.

There are those who will argue that the Life-Death Cycle just happened with no intelligent force behind it. Others will argue and insist that that is impossible; that an intelligent super-natural being was behind the emergence of the Life-Death Cycle. This suggests that the Life-Death is neither incidental nor coincidental but programmed  by a super-natural force often called God. We live such a short time that we are unable to appreciate that God exists. We end up making God an academic issue. Anything academic is unreal. Those who call themselves academic deal with unreal things.

If they do science they do artificial science, not whole science, not holistic science, because they usually first set the limits within to do their science. This way they underlie their superiority over other sciences that seek greater interconnectivity and interdependency in the generation of knowledge.

What I want to write about is neither the Life-Death Cycle nor artificial knowledge generation. We belong to the compartment of Life-Death Cycle when we are alive and to the death compartment of when we die. We cannot escape belonging to either whatever we do and how we do using science. We may use science to prolong life but we all, at different times end up in the death component. There is no sense in killing or wishing another death. If we accepted this there would be no need to militarise life or society.

What I want to write on in detail is what I have seen in the last 74 years in life. I have seen many people come and go into the death component. When my grandfather, Wadedde Buganga Jacob, a former colonial Ikumbya Sub-county Clerk died in 1954, at the age of 68, I was four years old but old enough to remember that he was always at home for a short time. Most of the time he was doing his clerical work away from home. I don’t know if I learned anything from him. Maybe writing.

When my uncle, Constantine Wekiya Ngobi, a former truck driver of the Kenya African Rifles in Burma during the Second World War, died at the age of 68 in 1990, I was 41 years old. I don’t remember anything I learned from him because if he was not working he was drinking waragi.

When my uncle, Rev Silas Wekiya, a long-time servant of God who preached in Bukedi, Bugisu, Buganda and finally Busoga, died at the age of  68 in 1991, I was 42 years old. I learnt the virtue of spiritual growth and development from him. In any case I had learned from the ancient Greek philosophers of the unity of body, mind and spirit when they taught “Healthy body, healthy mind healthy spirit.”

By this time I was starting to get scared of age 68. So, when I reached that age five years ago, in 2018, I started to think that I did not have enough time in the Life compartment of the Life-Death Cycle. I almost called my children, the last of whom was 25 years of age then, that my time had come to go, and to pronounce to them my wishes after death. Somehow a voice whispered to me “Don’t. There is a lot that you haven’t done you must do before you breaths your last.

I now know that life does not belong to me. I also think that each of us, even the most stupid or a one we may consider useless, has a purpose to serve in the Life Compartment of the Life-Death Cycle. Otherwise, life on Earth is only momentary. Do good when you can and avoid being and doing evil. Know our collective destiny, whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless, strong or week, literate or illiterate, educated or educated is to enter the death component.

As I said don’t kill anybody or wish anybody death. We shall all end up there. Even our animals and plants!

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda