Nigeria, April 11 -- There are some people who come into your life and you wish you had never met them. Yet there are others whom you meet and begin to wonder where they have been all your life. Dr Chido Onumah belongs firmly to the latter category - those rare individuals you encounter, connect with instantly, and wish you had known much earlier.

Although I had followed him for years through his weekly column in The PUNCH, I first met Chido in person in 2015 in Abuja. I had been co-opted into a team on a national anti-corruption assignment, of which he was a key member. From the highly cerebral and sometimes polemical tone of his newspaper writings, I had formed an image of an aggressive, bullish, and impatient activist. The man who sto...