In the South-East, the people are witnessing a new dawn in the way they bid final farewell to their dead ones. For those of them who want to give their loved ones good farewell, it has been simplified as Sir Kevin Chukwumobi, managing director of Apams Limited, a firm of funeral undertakers, says they are in the East to wipe away the tears of their people.

Indeed, Apams has shown great class in burials in the East, particularly the ones of the late Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, Chief Cyprian Ekwensi, Chief Ralph Uwazuruike's mother and Prof Chike Obi.

And Chukwumobi in this exclusive interview with Daily Sun says they have not even started with the concepts on how the dead should be made to rest in perfect peace. Excerpts:
Starting Apams
The idea to go into full funeral undertaking business came to me in 1992. Formerly, I was into pharmaceutical business, but along the line I was also doing ambulance business in a small scale until when I finally left the pharmaceutical business to concentrate fully on funeral service.
Since then, I have been deeply into it. However, the funeral undertaking business is not easy like other businesses. It requires a lot of vision, and it is very stressful.

At Apams, we have a good concept of funeral undertaking. When I was into pharmaceutical, I was always thinking about how to lift the face of funeral, how to modernize funeral business. The way other people carry out the business seems to be fetish, so, I decided to give it another look so that the business will be attractive to other people.

My experience with bereaved families
Actually, they feel bad when their loved ones die, and, of course, you must feel bad, but the only thing you can do for your loved one is to give him/her a befitting burial.

Burying the dead in style
We have a lot of services; from funeral decoration, which involves the lying in state to burying the corpse, that is lowering the body to the grave. We begin by decorating the living room where the corpse will lie in state; then we have pall bearers, people that will carry the casket from the morgue to the time for interment. We also have band group that gives command to the pall bearers that handle the casket, we also have the wreathe bearers, well dressed boys or girls. Then we have security personnel that control both vehicle and human traffic.

We also have the lower device, a special machine that we use to lower the body into the grave instead of using rope or entering into the grave to bring the casket down.

We are also into tombs, after burial we beautify the tomb with marble or tiles, depending on the one the family wants. We cover the funerals by providing video recording and photography services. We have hearse, ambulances in Mercedes Benz, Pontiac , Expedition jeep, Chevrolet Limousine, Cadillac Limousine, Lincoln Navigator jeep, Hummer jeep and there is one powerful jeep that is coming again which I will not mention here.

Selecting ambulances
It depends on the bereaved family, they make their choice. They have the right to choose the kind of vehicle they want their loved ones to be carried in. You can see now one of the Commissioners of Police is here in the office, inspecting the vehicle he will use for his loved one.
Yes, the choice is also determined by the price, like the price of Hummer and the price of Mercedes are not the same, the same with Pontiac and Limousine, Lincoln Navigator and Expedition Jeep. So, we have ranges and different tariff for them.

Our caskets
We have domestic caskets, they are the ones we built by ourselves, then we have foreign ones, the ones we imported. The ones you are seeing here are all imported and the other ones over there are the ones we manufactured by ourselves. The imported ones are quite different from the ones made in Nigeria , particularly in their finishing and this is reflected in their prices. Like this imported one here is N3 million while the one we manufactured is N500,000. We have price ranges which start from N60,000 to N3 million. But the interior of the imported casket is different, if you open it, it is well furnished, even though it is a casket, you may like to sleep in it, it is very, very rich, the perfume coming out from it will tell you that it is a quality casket.

Manufacturing the imported caskets here
We are trying our best. If you take a close look at the imported casket and the one we manufactured here, they are very close, but not 100 per cent. And there is no way we can get it 100 per cent because of the materials and facilities used in producing the foreign ones. But we are discussing with a Chinese company so that they can be doing it here for us, but the requirements are too much, we want to negotiate and discuss with our bankers to see if we can still bring them down.

MASSOB leader mother's burial
It was fantastic, we really prepared for it. In fact, the burial ceremony of Uwazuruike's mother, I have not had such experience before; the fun, drama and dancing were too much, and I really enjoyed it. No matter the crying, everybody was really enjoying because of the way we handled the funeral. The people of Okwe and other sympathizers that came for the burial really admired us because we gave Chief Ralph Uwazuruike what we have not given to anybody during the funeral. In that burial we used about six vehicles, and six pall bearers, so that if one set gets tired another set will take over. We also displayed our second lowering machine in that funeral and above all he is the third person we used our Hummer hearse in Igbo land.

Other prominent burials
They are too numerous to mention, but let me just mention the recent ones; we handled the Uwazuruike's mother burial; Chief Steven Osita Osadebe, the musician; the late Prof Chike Obi, the mathematician; Chief Cyprian Ekwensi, the novelist. I think these burials were from January to April this year.
So, we want to celebrate our loved ones in the East in a manner that has never been seen before because people do not expect there is good thing in the East, so, we want to prove them wrong.
You cannot see our concept anywhere in this country, we are different in undertaking business; from the way we handle our casket to the finishing of the funeral ceremony, we are unique.

For instance, I started the use of Pontiac ambulance in this country. I also started the use of jeep. Right now I have the latest Limousine in this country, I am the only one that has Hummer jeep as ambulance in this country, and yet I have not put up to 40 per cent of the concept I have about giving our loved ones befitting burials.

Celebrating the dead
The funeral cerebration depends on the mood of the bereaved family. It is either celebrated with glamour and fanfare or remorsefully. Like in the death of young people, if the family has come up with their own ideas, we know how to handle the situation because people will not find it funny with too much glamour in the death of a young person. But when it comes to the death of an aged person even though it is painful we will make it to be joyful.

Cemetery business
I have 25 plots of land at the tollgate in Onitsha here within Ogbunike, we want to use for the construction of standard cemetery because we don't have good cemetery around here. And we will build about 400 tombs there.

Mourners
We have mourners, if you want me to call one of them to start crying here now, you will give him money to stop otherwise he won't stop crying.
If you ask him to start crying he will start immediately and you ask him to stop, he will start laughing also.

This business
My brother, we have the heart and we have the vision, it is lucrative, there is money from it, it is lucrative.

Had it been you came earlier than this you would have seen us when we were praying. Our prayer is mainly for God to give us our daily bread. That's a general prayer, but we are not looking for somebody to die because the ones already in the mortuary our company alone cannot handle it.

How people see my class of business
When I started everybody was a kind being scared of me, people were teasing me, some were mocking me, a young boy like you why have you decided to just carry dead bodies and that was when I was doing it in a small scale; I had only one ambulance then. Now, the business is for the big men, I know some big men that want to come in, but due to they don't have the vision, they cannot do it, some have done it and it folded up.

So, whatever you are doing, just try to put in your best, work hard in all sincerity and God will bless you. Now, people are talking about Apams, people who know me are talking about Apams. Looking at Apams from nothing to something now, somebody who doesn't know me will think that this guy came from abroad with a lot of money and started this business or that I am a cocaine pusher or a ritualist, or a 419ner, but people who know when I started know that Apams has paid its price.