Oga Eze sold puffpuff by the old railway bridge
in Surulere, 1979, when the petrol pumps still
smelled like miracles and every second son was
called “Engineer” before he finished primary
school. He wore three shirts to hide his belly,
not from shame—but because the ghost of his late
uncle, a man who died when the first crude pipe
burst in Ogoni, now sat on his ribs like a sack
of kolanuts and whispered in Pidgin: “You eat
good food, but the land still hungry.”
The world had changed: oil money didn’t just buy
cars—it bought silence. People stopped burying
their dead properly. Graves became parking
spaces. Ancestors didn’t rest; they got evicted.
And now, every child born to a vendor who ate
well during the boom carried a spiritdebt. Oga
Eze never knew he was pregnant until his third
puffpuff batch burned black and the market women
laughed—“Oya, Oga, your baby dey dance inside
you like small agidi in boiling pot!”
He tried prayer. Pastor Bola’s daughter, who
sold garri at the next stall, prayed over him
with palm oil and a cassette of “Jesus Is the
Way.” The ghost laughed. Next morning, Oga Eze
found his entire stock of puffpuff turned into
tiny, warm stones. He didn’t cry. He ate one. It
tasted like diesel and yam.
The hard rule: no child born to a vendor who
profited from oil money could live past their
first birthday unless the parent gave up their
first meal of the day to the earth. Oga Eze
broke it on Day 17—he ate akara instead of
giving it to the soil. That night, his stall
caught fire without flame. The ghost didn’t
speak. It just handed him a rusted fuel cap.
He walked to the old shrine at Iju, where the
earth still remembered how to swallow. He didn’t
beg. He placed his last N50 note on the root of
the iroko tree—and spat out the stone from his
mouth. The earth swallowed it. The ghost sighed.
“You pay with hunger,” it said. Not in words. In
silence. In the way the market women suddenly
stopped laughing.
By dawn, Oga Eze’s belly was flat. His stall was
back. The puffpuff fried golden. And when the
pastor’s daughter asked if he’d been healed, he
just grinned and said, “Na God dey work, but the
soil no dey lie.”
The baby never came. But the land remembered.
And for the first time since ’73, the oil pipes
ran clean.
