Eze Okafor walks the Ibadan Road at dawn,

selling roasted plantain from a dented tin cart,

his hands still smelling of palm oil and last

night’s prayers. He doesn’t know the girl who

buys two pieces every Tuesday is the daughter of

Bishop Nwosu — the man who burned down three

shrines in Surulere last year for “demonic

contamination.” She never speaks. Just nods.

Leaves a naira coin too much. He keeps it in his

left sock.

The campus at University of Ibadan smells of

chalk dust and diesel fumes. Students chant

nationalist songs, but beneath it, the air hums

with something older. The oil boom didn’t just

bring cars and concrete — it cracked the earth

open, and where the pipes bled, the land

swallowed children. The government buried the

bodies. The spirits didn’t.

One Thursday, she doesn’t come. On Friday, her

classmates whisper she’s been screaming in

chapel, clawing at her chest, calling out names

in Igbo no one teaches anymore. Bishop Nwosu

locks her in the basement of the megachurch. The

pastor says it’s possession. The students say

it’s the oil ghost — the one that rises when the

pipelines leak and the rich eat chicken in

airconditioned rooms while children cough black

phlegm in Port Harcourt.

Eze finds the old woman who once sold agbo in

the Ojuelegba market. She gives him a bundle of

dried snake skin, a broken rosary, and three

drops of kerosene. “The ghost doesn’t want souls,

” she rasps. “It wants to be remembered. The oil

made it hungry. The church made it angry.”

That night, Eze climbs the church fence. He

doesn’t pray. He doesn’t quote scripture. He

lights the kerosene on the floor of the basement,

pours the snake skin into the flame, and speaks

the names of the boys who vanished near the Agip

depot in 1973 — names he learned from his uncle

who buried them. The ghost doesn’t scream. It

exhales. The girl’s eyes roll back. Her mouth

opens. Not in prayer. In song. A lullaby from

Aba.

The bishop bursts in with his men. They drag Eze

out. They burn the room.

But the next morning, the girl walks into the

campus canteen. She buys two roasted plantains.

She leaves a naira coin too much. She smiles.

Eze doesn’t take it. He knows the ghost didn’t

leave.

It just changed houses.

And now it wears her skin.

The rule: no exorcism can be performed by a man

who has never touched oil.

The rule: if the spirit speaks in a lullaby, it

has already chosen its next home.