Doyinsola Abiola's first name means honey in Yoruba.
Yet initially her conversation is tinged only with bitterness as she replays the memory of her husband's death.
Mashood Abiola, for whom she still grieves three years into her widowhood, was elected president of Nigeria in 1994 but was imprisoned under General Sani Abacha's rule and died four years later in jail.
His last three years were spent in solitary confinement.
"I do not know what he died of. The Oputa panel, which is like your truth and reconciliation commission, is still sitting and the revelations that are emerging leave no doubt that my husband was killed in jail."
Chairperson of the CNN African journalist of the year judging panel, Abiola is in Johannesburg for the award ceremony.
Nigeria's first woman editor, she was placed at the helm of the Concord newspaper by her late husband, the paper's owner.
Abiola is the Concord's editor-in-chief and publisher until such time that the newspaper is returned to her husband's estate.
Then the future is uncertain because he died intestate.
It is as if she is able to continue the life she began with her husband in spite of his death; "his spirit lives on".
She paints a bleak picture of Nigeria's mass media, which should be playing a frontline position in building democracy, but instead is crippled by the legacy of military rule and economic decline.
A further complication is that there is no constant power supply.
The state government is prevented by federal governments from solving the problem regionally, says Abiola.
"So the newspapers are dying, including mine," she says. "In 1995 soldiers were put on our premises and they destroyed the presses. The newspaper was proscribed for 18 months. Now I am fighting against the actions of the military in court but it is unlikely that it will be resolved in my lifetime."
Abiola is ready to fight alone. She still lives in the mansion belonging to her husband, where she keeps her own counsel and dwells on the memory of the man who, she says, "was my life".
"He was the father of my 17-year-old daughter, Doyinsola, and the first man to respect me for who I am."
By this she means that he allowed her to express her independence of spirit and mind.
Abiola's openness about herself and her life as the fourth wife of Chief Mashood Abiola in the big mansion in Lagos is moving.
One of three daughters of a civil servant and a diligent housewife who insisted on the importance of education, Abiola left her home in Military avenue in Lagos and the Colonial Anglican Church she attended as a child to go to Britain and, later, to the United States.
She left behind her innocence and her white boyfriend whom she exchanged for black consciousness and radical feminism.
Once she had graduated from New York University with a PhD in communications and political science she went home and shifted gear. She entered a traditional polygamous marriage to Mashood Abiola - an adaptation which she says suited her.
The other wives?
"I simply shut them out. I lived apart from my husband and the mansion for the first 10 years of our marriage."
Sexual jealousy? "It was not a problem. Sex is overrated anyway - after half an hour of even the most spectacular acrobatics it is over and then what? I do not think I will remarry."
Also, Abiola converted to Islam, from which she draws much serenity and which she says is surprisingly progressive in its approach to women. However, she says the sharia law recently instituted in the north of Nigeria is religion being used for political ends - something she does not approve of.
Abiola bemoans the fact that the world's images of Nigeria are mainly of corruption and ethnic strife. She wants to see more African stories told from within the continent by Africans.
In Nigeria, says Abiola, away from the catastrophic vision of sick children and potholes runs a deeper, more vital story: the inequalities between the haves and have-nots, educational imbalances, the need to develop human and natural resources.
Also, the people who were around at the time of Mashood Abiola's death have not yet left, she says. She cannot talk about that.
Her laugh when I urge her to continue is strangled, strange.
She says: "I would have thought that Nigeria's present ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo, would have emerged from his imprisonment under Abacha's rule a more compassionate person. He has already had a go at running the country under military rule and, admittedly, when he was anointed he relinquished power to the civilians.
"But the appointment of lieutenants still has to be laid at the president's table. That is where the buck stops. I wish we had a Nelson Mandela as president."
Abiola swivels her chair closer to mine so that our faces almost touch. She is speaking softly: "You see, a good man is a very invaluable leader. A transparently good person who subscribes to a minimum code of conduct - who knows what is right and wrong, we do not have that."
Returning to the subject of Obasanjo, she says: "I would have expected that a person who has been jailed by Abacha, and gone through the brutality of the military would have emerged a wiser more compassionate person.
"What will happen now? I sincerely believe we will muddle through. In spite of us, Nigeria will be great - we are trying our best to run it down.
"My daughter, Doyinsola, is doing her A-levels in England at Roedean girls' school in Brighton where she is reading political science and economics. It is in her and other Nigerians like her that I see the future of the country."