SHC Bibopere Ajube, Leads Massive Send-Off for Pa Onyeisue 1

By Doubra | Ogele News Correspondent | Delta State

OBINOMBA, DELTA STATE — The flyer had already done its work long before the first canopy was erected in Obinomba.

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SHC Bibopere Ajube,

It moved through WhatsApp groups, landed on church notice boards and travelled from Benin City deep into the creeks of Ukwuani with a message that was simple and absolute. Exit of an Icon. Ogbuefi Michael Odali Onyeisue. Age 76. Peacefully departed this world on the 26th of January 2026.

Nobody wrote on that flyer what SHC Bibopere Ajube, Gallery Security Services, Bradama Skills International and a Niger Delta music legend were quietly preparing to bring to this community across two days that Obinomba will not forget in a hurry.

Thursday the 26th of February was when SHC Bibopere Ajube announced their presence.

They did not send ahead a delegation. They did not arrive quietly and find a corner. The organisation moved into Obinomba as one, early and deliberate, settling into the occasion with the kind of commitment that told the family of Anthony Onyeisue everything they needed to know before a single speech was delivered.

This correspondent was on ground and watched it happen. The staff members of Gallery Security Services and Bradama Skills International were also there, colleagues who had crossed into Delta State not because protocol demanded it but because a man they work alongside had lost his father and that was reason enough.

By Thursday evening the vigil of prayers at No. 2 Michael Onyeisue Street, the road in Obinomba that carries Pa Onyeisue’s name, had drawn a crowd that filled the compound and spilled into the street. The atmosphere was thick with the kind of warmth that only gathers when people who genuinely mean to be somewhere show up together.

Friday the 27th of February was when Obinomba fully understood what it had on its hands.

The corpse of Pa Onyeisue departed the mortuary in Obiaruku in the early hours and made its final journey home to No. 2 Michael Onyeisue Street for a lying-in-state that drew more people than the compound had been built to hold. By 10 o’clock the Requiem Mass at St. Theresa Catholic Church Obinomba had begun, solemn and full, the choir carrying the weight that only a Catholic Mass for a man who himself spent sixty years singing in a choir can properly carry.

After the Mass, after the interment, Obinomba caught its breath.

Then Barrister Smooth arrived and the community exhaled completely.

For those who need no introduction the name is enough. For those who do, Barrister Smooth is a Niger Delta highlife legend whose presence at any occasion is not background entertainment. It is an event inside an event. When he and his team set up at the reception on that Friday and the first notes hit the open air above Umukwata Primary School field beside St. Theresa, the afternoon transformed. The grief did not disappear. It simply took on the shape that the Niger Delta has always known how to give sorrow, music that makes the living celebrate the dead with joy rather than only tears.

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The field filled quickly. But it was the names already seated under the canopy that told the fuller story of what Friday had become.

High Chief Mike Loyibo, Prime Minister of Tuomo Kingdom, was there. Hon. Okubo Robert, Special Adviser to the Edo State Governor, had made the journey from Edo State. Hon. Molos Caleb Ebimobowei, Executive Chairman of Ese Odo Local Government Area in Ondo State, was present. Hon. Twatimi Samuel was in attendance. All of them in one place, in Obinomba, Ukwuani LGA, on a Friday afternoon, for the father of Anthony Onyeisue, General Manager of SHC Bibopere Ajube.

This correspondent moved through the crowd and listened. A source close to the occasion put the whole day into five words that no formal statement could have beaten. “Nobody was asked twice.”

A community elder found this correspondent near the close of the reception and spoke without any prompting. “I have never seen this kind of thing here,” he said quietly. “All these big people. For one man’s father.”

He was not complaining. He was a man searching for the right words for something that had simply exceeded his frame of reference.

This correspondent understood him completely.

Pa Onyeisue spent his life as a forklift operator turned Distribution Supervisor at Guinness Nigeria, a choir member, a father of six, a community man who never once moved through this world like someone waiting for applause. The road named after him in Obinomba is the most honest monument to who he was. Solid. Permanent. Earned.

But across Thursday and Friday, SHC Bibopere Ajube, Gallery Security Services and Bradama Skills International gave him something else entirely. They gave him the kind of send-off that tells a community what a man’s life was truly worth, measured not in titles but in the people who refused to stay away.

Barrister Smooth played. The dignitaries sat. The crowd celebrated. And Obinomba watched all of it and understood.

Pa Onyeisue raised a son worth knowing.

And the people worth knowing came.

Doubra reports for Ogele News from the Delta State Bureau.