Nigeria, April 9 -- He was always frank, brutally frank when he decided to speak, and he spoke often even in his last days about the country and its malcontents. About a decade ago, I was in his house in Asokoro, off T.Y. Danjuma street, interrogating a sore point in the relationship between his Ijaw ethnic group and the Nigerian state. I told him after our meeting that he was indeed more than an Ijaw leader; he was a quintessential Nigerian patriot and elder statesman. Leadership of our Southern Nigeria and Middle Belt Forum over a decade confirmed my assessment of the irrepressible petrel of Nigerian politics. Together, the Forum and other like-minded representations had,inter alia, fashioned a pan-Nigerian document which we took to the...