Ezekiel Okoro walked into St. Mary’s Seminary in
Ibadan with no luggage, only a torn Bible and
the scent of kola nut still clinging to his
shirt — the same shirt he wore the night he
burned his mother’s ancestral shrine in Surulere.
He had become a man of God, they said. But the
seminary elders knew: he came back because the
spirits wouldn’t let him go.
The world had changed when the oil boom cracked
open the earth and the ancestors started
speaking through TV screens. Not in visions — in
live broadcasts. Pastors on EbonyLife claimed
they could baptise debt away. Young men in
Surulere began whispering: if you pray hard
enough, the bank account appears. Ezekiel was
the first to prove it — he prayed, then withdrew
₦2.3 million from a machine that had no card
slot. The church called it faith. The police
called it fraud. The spirits called it a
contract.
He wore cassocks now, but his fingers still
twitched like they were typing passwords. His
father, Pastor Okoro, kept the family’s compound
running on offerings from men who swore Ezekiel
had healed their wives — but the truth was,
Ezekiel had given them fake bank receipts
printed in Aba, signed by a ghost named “Nneka
Okeke, Financial Angel of the Holy Spirit.” The
rule was simple: no one could ask how the money
came. Ask, and the account freezes. Ask, and the
child in the next room stops breathing.
He began dreaming of a girl in a green buba —
Adaora, his university sweetheart, now married
to a civil servant in Abuja. He had left her
when the money came. Now, every morning, her
face appeared on his prayer mat, wet with tears
he couldn’t shed. She had not written. He knew
why: his name was on a list. Not the police list.
The spirit list.
On the eve of his ordination, the power went out
across Lagos. In the dark, the TV in the chapel
flickered on by itself. A woman in white stood
before it — not a pastor. Not a saint. Her lips
moved. No sound came. But Ezekiel heard: You
took three souls. You owe one more. He had not
known the receipts were signed in blood. He had
not known the girls who vanished after receiving
his “blessings” were the price.
He walked to the church basement at midnight.
Not to pray. To burn the last receipt. The fire
caught the wooden floor. The altar cracked. The
spirits didn’t scream. They laughed — the low,
wet chuckle of men who had been waiting since
the first oil rig drilled into their bones.
The next morning, the seminary found him
kneeling in ash, holding Adaora’s old school
photograph. His cassock was clean. His hands
were empty. No money. No Bible. No name on the
ordination list.
They buried him in the compound’s farthest
corner, under the mango tree where his
grandmother used to sell pepper soup. No priest
came. No hymn. Just the wind carrying the scent
of burning kola.
The family’s bank account remained open. Still
growing. Still silent.
The spirits had not taken his soul.
They had taken his silence.
