Ezekiel Okafor walks into the Ministry of
Internal Affairs at 5:30 a.m., his third pair of
shoes worn thin from Lagos potholes, his degree
certificate tucked inside a plastic bag like a
secret sin. The building still smells of
kerosene and wet chalk — the generators ran all
night, again, because the oil boom’s ghost still
haunts the wiring, and the minister’s wife
demands her airconditioned office stay cool even
when the nation’s salary fund is dry.
He is twentyfour, unemployed for fourteen months
after his economics degree from UI, the last
graduate from his village to wear a tie. His
mother’s letters arrive folded in prayer cloths:
“Your father died praying you’d be a civil
servant. Don’t let the devil steal your future.”
He takes the job — clerk, Grade Level 07 — not
for purpose, but because the Ministry still pays
in cash, even if it takes six months.
The workplace harassment isn’t shouted. It’s in
the way the Section Head, Mr. Ogunlade, makes
him kneel every Monday to receive his pay
envelope — “for humility,” he says, smiling like
a pastor at dawn. Ezekiel’s colleagues do it too.
No one speaks. The rule isn’t written, but
everyone knows: kneel, and you eat. Refuse, and
your name vanishes from the payroll like a name
erased from a church prayer list.
The world mechanism? Postindependence Nigeria
still runs on the colonial illusion that power
is earned through ritual submission — not merit,
not law, but the silent bow. The Ministry
doesn’t just collect taxes; it collects
obeisance. And the generators? They’re the last
flickering soul of the oil boom — a time when
men believed the state would feed them. Now, it
feeds only those who kneel.
On the seventh Monday, Ezekiel doesn’t kneel. He
stands. The envelope is slapped on the desk.
“You want bread?” Ogunlade asks, voice soft as a
prayer. “Then bend.” The room holds its breath.
Outside, a woman screams as a bus hits a goat on
Ikorodu Road — a sound that cuts through the
silence like a curse.
He picks up the envelope. Walks out. Doesn’t go
home. Goes to the church across the street — not
to pray, but to sit. Pastor Adeyemi’s daughter
sees him. She brings him pap and sugar. Says
nothing. He eats. His fingers shake.
That night, he burns his ID card. Not in fire —
in the toilet bowl. The water turns brown. The
next morning, he boards a bus to Benin City with
two hundred naira and his mother’s last letter.
He doesn’t know where he’s going. But he knows
this: no man in this country will make him kneel
for bread again.
The Ministry doesn’t replace him. No one does.
His name fades from the rolls. But three weeks
later, someone finds his handwriting on the
Ministry’s wall — scratched with a nail: “I did
not kneel. I walked.”
The guards scrub it off. But the story spreads.
Not in newspapers. In marketplaces. In Pidgin
whispers. In church halls. In Lagos, people say:
“That one, he carry his dignity like a gun.”
Ezekiel doesn’t return. But the Ministry never
pays its workers on time again.
