Nigeria, April 3 -- As I prepared to depart Nigeria for the United States for the 2015 conference of the Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) in Philadelphia, I received a message from the Washington DC headquarters of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists indicating that ICIJ deputy director, Marina Walker Guevara, would also be attending the four-day gathering fixed for June 3-7 of that year, and would informally meet with a few us who had been penciled down for a new, huge investigative project.

As hard as I probed, I was unsuccessful in squeezing details of the new projects off colleagues at the ICIJ. The best that Will Fitzgibbon, my closest man there, could tell me was that the project would resemble Swiss Le...