Growing Tribute....CHIEF DANIEL OSIKHEME ORBIH: EXIT OF A POLITICAL ICON

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. But when a man dies at the time his wisdom is most needed, the loss is irreparable."- Sir Jimmy Carter,one time American President 

By Prof. Mike Ozekhome, CON

There are men whose passing does not merely end a life, but it interrupts a conversation that has been running for decades. On Monday, 31st August 2026, that conversation stopped. Chief Daniel Osikheme Orbih, famously called Kuluku I, died at the age of sixty-four. For a man who had spent nearly three decades embedded in the machinery of Nigerian party politics, the news travelled with a peculiar speed and weight.

To speak of Dan Orbih only in the vocabulary of politics would be to tell half the story, and perhaps the smaller half. He was, before he was a politician, a son of Etsako soil, a student of business, and a man who built enterprises with his own hands long before he learned to build political structures.

The Ogbona boy was born on 27th October 1961 in Ogbona, in what is today the Etsako Central Local Government Area of Edo State. He came into a household already marked by public significance. His father, the late Chief M. C. K. Orbih, was a respected figure in the political life of the old Bendel State, and it is not difficult to imagine that the younger Orbih's earliest exposure to the language of leadership came from watching his revered father. After all, a fruit does not fall far away from its mother tree.

His choice of discipline, Business Administration at the University of Benin, would prove prophetic. Long before Orbih became known as a political strategist, he was first a businessman, and the instincts he sharpened in commerce, an eye for structure, a patience for negotiation and a tolerance for risk, would later serve him well in the far less predictable arena of party politics.

After graduation, Orbih did not walk immediately into politics. He ventured into business, taking up the management of his father's hotel enterprise in Auchi. From there, his commercial interests expanded beyond Edo State altogether, extending into the cement industry in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, a sector known for its scale and demand for sound judgment. These years gave him an entrepreneurial grounding that few of his political contemporaries could claim, and an independence of means that allowed him to weather the financial demands of sustained political combat.

*Tender Feet in Politics

Orbih's political journey began in earnest in the closing years of the 1990s, during the transitional period that restored Nigeria to civilian rule. In 1998, under the platform of the All Peoples Party, he contested for the position of Deputy Governorship candidate in Edo State. The bid did not carry him into office but it announced him.

It was not long before Orbih found his way into the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, the platform with which his name would become almost inseparable for the following quarter century. There, he came under the tutelage of the late Chief Anthony Anenih, a founding father of the party and for many years Chairman of its Board of Trustees. To be counted among Anenih's political students was, in the Nigeria of that era, to be marked out for advancement.

Under that mentorship, Orbih rose steadily. He served on committees at both state and national levels. In 2006, he was named a member of the PDP Presidential Electoral Panel and in the same period, chaired the Edo State PDP Finance Committee between 2006 and 2007. The following year, he served on the party's Edo State Campaign Committee ahead of the 2007 general elections. Each assignment was an apprenticeship for the office that would come to define 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 needed a steady hand. Chief Anthony Anenih and other party leaders settled, unanimously, on Dan Orbih. He went on to chair the Edo State chapter of the PDP from 2008 until 2019, an unbroken tenure of eleven years that stands, by most accounts, as the longest any individual has held a state chairmanship of any political party in the history of Nigeria's Fourth Republic.

Those eleven years were rarely quiet. Orbih presided over the party through victories and through painful reversals, through the loss of Edo State's governorship to the opposition and through the long, grinding work of rebuilding thereafter. He became known as one of the most active and constructive opposition chairmen in the country, a description earned through the discipline with which he held the party's structures together.

Orbih's long apprenticeship in Edo State politics eventually carried him to become the National Vice Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party for the South-South zone, a position that placed him among the elite circle of leaders who shaped the party's fortunes across six states.

*The Measure of the Man

What emerges from the accounts of those who knew him is a picture of a man who understood, perhaps better than most, that political structures are ultimately made of people. He knew the ward secretaries and the local government chairmen as well as he knew the governors and the ministers. He knew what it meant to lose an election and what it meant to rebuild a party from that loss.

His career is also a reminder of a particular kind of political labour that rarely receives recognition. Orbih was never Governor of Edo State nor did he sit in the National Assembly. His influence was exercised instead through the less glamorous, more demanding work of party administration, the work of holding a coalition together and settling disputes before they became ruptures.

*A Life of Faith

Politics and business were not the only dimensions of Dan Orbih's life. Beneath them was his Catholic faith. Baptized and raised in the Church, he attended Catholic Central School, Afashio, and later Our Lady of Fatima College, Auchi. That early formation flowed into adulthood when he became a practicing Catholic and a Knight of St. Mulumba.

His faith formed part of the discipline with which he navigated the turbulent worlds of politics and business. Those who knew him from Ogbona remember a man who, despite his political battles and business success, maintained a reputation for personal principles and straightforward business ethics.

His civic life extended beyond the Church and the party as well. Orbih was active within Rotary International, rising to Elite Donor status after a period as a Paul Harris Fellow donor.

*Farewell to a Political Icon

For all his public life, Dan Orbih remained, to those closest to him, a husband, a father, a brother, and an uncle. The outpouring of condolences that followed his death, from party leaders, political rivals, and ordinary Edo indigenes alike, speak of his place in their hearts.

Chief Dan Orbih's death closes a chapter not only in his own family's history but in the recent political history of Edo State and the South-South zone of Nigeria. Whatever verdict history renders on the battles Dan Orbih fought, it will struggle to dispute the depth of his commitment to the people he so ably served.

May his soul rest in peace.