Chief Daniel Osikheme Orbih: Exit of Political Icon

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His option of discipline in Business Administration at the University of Benin would show prophetic. Long before Orbih ended up being called a political strategist, he was, initially, a business person and the impulses he honed in commerce, an eye for structure, a persistence for settlement and a tolerance for threat, would later on serve him well in the far less foreseeable arena of celebration politics.

After graduation, Orbih did not stroll right away into politics. He ventured into company, using up the management of his dad’s hotel business in Auchi. From there, his industrial interests broadened beyond Edo State completely, extending into the cement market in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, a sector understood for its scale, its capital strength and its need for sound judgment.

These years in service are simple to ignore in an account controlled by his later political stature, yet they matter. They offered Orbih an entrepreneurial grounding that few of his political contemporaries might declare in equivalent procedure, and they offered him, too, a self-reliance of methods that would enable him, in later years, to weather the monetary and material needs of continual political fight.

Tender feet in Politics

Orbih’s political journey started in earnest in the closing years of the 1990s, throughout the transitional duration that would ultimately bring back Nigeria to civilian guideline. In 1998, under the platform of the All Peoples Party, he objected to for the position of Deputy Governorship prospect in Edo State. The quote did not bring him into workplace however it revealed him. It positioned his name in flow amongst the political class of the state at specifically the minute when the structure of the coming Fourth Republic was being put together.

It was shortly before Orbih discovered his method into the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the platform with which his name would end up being practically inseparable for the list below quarter century. There, he came under the tutelage of the late Chief Anthony Anenih, a starting dad of the celebration and, for several years, Chairman of its Board of Trustees. Anenih was a guy whose impact over PDP structures in the South-South and beyond was famous, and to be counted amongst his political trainees was, in the Nigeria of that age, to be defined for development.

Under that mentorship, Orbih increased gradually instead of marvelously. He served on committees at both state and nationwide levels of the celebration. In 2006, he was called a member of the PDP Presidential Electoral Panel and in the very same duration, chaired the Edo State PDP Finance Committee in between 2006 and 2007. The list below year, he served on the celebration’s Edo State Campaign Committee ahead of the 2007 basic elections. Each project was an apprenticeship for the workplace that would concern specify his public life.

Eleven Years at the Helm of Edo PDP

In 2008, following the death of the sitting state chairman, Chief Samson Ekhabafe, the PDP in Edo State required a constant hand. Chief Anthony Anenih and other celebration leaders settled, all, on Dan Orbih. It was a choice whose repercussions would extend throughout more than a years, for Orbih went on to chair the Edo State chapter of the PDP from 2008 up until 2019, an unbroken period of eleven years that stands, by the majority of accounts, as the longest any person has actually held a state chairmanship of any political celebration in the history of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.

Those eleven years were seldom peaceful. Orbih commanded the celebration through triumphes and through uncomfortable turnarounds, through the loss of Edo State’s governorship to the opposition and through the long, grinding work of reconstructing afterwards. He ended up being understood because duration as one of the most active and useful opposition chairmen in the nation, a description made through the discipline with which he held the celebration’s structures together even when it commanded no seat in Government House. He comprehended the grassroots nature of PDP in Edo State.

Orbih’s long apprenticeship in Edo State politics ultimately brought him to end up being the National Vice Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party for the South-South zone, a position that positioned him amongst the elite circle of leaders who formed the celebration’s fortunes throughout 6 states and, by extension, within the councils of nationwide politics.

The Measure of the Man

What emerges from the accounts of those who understood him is an image of a guy who comprehended, maybe much better than the majority of, that political structures are eventually made from individuals. He understood the ward secretaries and the city government chairmen in addition to he understood the guvs and the ministers. He understood what it suggested to lose an election and what it suggested to restore a celebration from that loss. That type of understanding is gotten just through years of client, typically thankless, work and it is specifically that sort of understanding that Edo State politics now discovers itself without.

A Legacy in the Structures He Built

His profession is likewise a tip of a specific type of political labour that hardly ever gets the acknowledgment paid for to chosen workplace. Orbih was never ever Governor of Edo State nor did he being in the National Assembly. His impact was worked out rather through the less attractive, more requiring work of celebration administration, the work of holding a union together, of settling disagreements before they ended up being ruptures, of guaranteeing that a celebration without power in Government House nevertheless maintained the discipline to contest, and ultimately to complete, for it once again. That is a type of management too quickly ignored in a political culture focused on titles, yet it is perhaps the kind of management on which every electoral success eventually depends.

A Life of Faith

Politics and service were not just the 2 measurements of Dan Orbih’s life. Below them was his Catholic faith. Baptized and raised in the Church, he went to Catholic Central School, Afashio, and later on Our Lady of Fatima College, Auchi. That early development streamed into the adult years when he ended up being a practicing Catholic and a Knight of St. Mulumba.

His faith formed part of the discipline with which he browsed a life invested in the unstable worlds of politics and service. Those who understood him from Ogbona keep in mind a male who, regardless of his political fights and company success, preserved a track record for individual concepts and simple service principles. His Christianity seemed less a Sunday identity than an internal compass by which he looked for to perform his affairs.

His civic life extended beyond the Church and the celebration. Orbih was active within Rotary International, increasing to Elite Donor status after a duration as a Paul Harris Fellow.

Goodbye to a Political Icon

For all a number of political activities of public life, Dan Orbih stayed (to those closest to him) an other half, a daddy, a bro, and an uncle. The profusion of acknowledgements that followed his death from celebration leaders, political competitors, and regular Edo indigenes alike mention his location in their hearts.

Chief Dan Orbih’s death closes a chapter not just in his own household’s history however in the current political history of Edo State and the South-South zone, of Nigeria.

As Edo State partners and the larger household grieve Dan, the homages that have actually gathered from political allies and competitors alike, settle on a single style that whatever decision history renders on the fights Dan Orbih combated, it will have a hard time to challenge the depth of his dedication to individuals he so competently served.

May his soul rest in peace.

–Prof Mike Ozekhome, CON, is a constitutional legal representative and human rights activist based in Abuja.