Chinedu Okoro, once a campus radio voice at
University of Ibadan, now broadcasts from a
Lagos studio in a crumbling building on Allen
Avenue, his voice slick with Pidgin charm and
Pentecostal blessings — “God dey work, my people!
” — while selling fake herbal tonics to girls
chasing university dreams. His channel, “Naija
Pulse,” has 2.3 million followers, but he never
mentions the thing he carries: the curse from
his mother’s village in Anambra, where elders
say the land remembers every promise broken
since 1960.
The world changed when the oil boom died. Not
just the cars, not just the broken pipes in
Surulere — but the spirits. After ’85, when the
state stopped paying pensions and pastors
started selling “miracle oil” in plastic sachets,
the old gods stopped sleeping. They took root in
radios, TVs, cell towers — anything that carried
voice. If you speak truth on air, they listen.
If you lie, they bite.
One night, Chinedu, high on caffeine and the
pressure of his uncle’s funeral next week — the
family wants him to marry his cousin, not the
girl from Abuja — broadcasts live about the
“Forgotten Republic.” He reads a letter from a
dead Biafran soldier, found in a Lagos market,
begging for the country to remember its soul.
The air crackles. The studio lights flicker. His
headset drops dead. Outside, the streetlights go
out — not from loadshedding. From silence.
The next morning, his phone buzzes with 17,000
DMs: “You woke him.” He checks the studio CCTV.
No one entered. But the floor near his mic is
wet with black mud — smelling of wet earth and
burnt kolanut. He tries to flee. Booked a flight
to Canada. Paid a smuggler in Surulere.
At the airport, his ticket vanishes from the
system. His passport burns in his pocket — not
fire, but ash that smells like his grandmother’s
shrine. On the highway, his taxi stalls at a
checkpoint. The officer doesn’t ask for papers.
Just whispers, “You spoke for the dead. The air
remembers.”
He runs. Through Lekki, through Oshodi, past the
shrine of Saint Jude where women tie red threads
to pray for husbands. He climbs the old water
tower in Aba Road, where the signal booster
still hums. He grabs the transmitter, his
fingers shaking.
He doesn’t speak. He sings — the lullaby his
mother sang when the electricity failed, the one
the elders said was the first song the land
learned after the war.
The city holds its breath.
At dawn, the radio towers across Lagos — all of
them — crackle to life. Not with music. Not with
ads. With one voice, clear as a child’s cry: “We
are still here.”
Chinedu is gone.
But his channel, “Naija Pulse,” still streams.
Every night at 11:30, a new message plays — no
name, no face. Just the same lullaby, looping.
And people listen.
Because the curse wasn’t on him.
It was on the country.
And now, the airwaves won’t let it sleep again.
