Ezekiel sells roasted groundnuts and kola nuts
under the broken shade of a tamarind tree in
Surulere, where the air still smells of wet
earth and the ghost of Nnamdi Azikiwe’s last
rally. He does not own a bicycle, but he owns
the rhythm of the market — when the postman
comes, when the police shift, when the pastor’s
wife buys three kola nuts for her husband’s
morning prayer. His daughter, Amara, is in
Ibadan, studying medicine on a scholarship that
expires in six weeks. The letter from the
university arrived with a stamp that looked like
a cracked egg.
The era is 1964. Electricity flickers like a
dying prayer. In Lagos, the new republic’s
ballot boxes are being filled before the voters
even arrive — not by paper, but by inked fingers
pressed into wooden slats by men in khaki who
whisper to the spirits of the old gods still
sleeping beneath the concrete. The state doesn’t
steal votes; it rewrites the soil they’re born
from. If you vote for the wrong man, your
child’s name vanishes from the school roll. If
you protest, your kola nut stall burns with your
wife’s anklets still inside.
Ezekiel’s hard rule: never touch the ballot. His
father died when he tried to cast a vote in 1959
— shot in the chest while holding a kola nut
like a prayer bead. The soldiers said he was
smuggling secrets. The church said he was cursed.
Ezekiel keeps the kola nut in his pocket, the
last one from his mother’s farm in Enugu. He
believes it carries her voice.
The election day comes with no fanfare. The
polling station is a repurposed schoolhouse
where the chalkboard still holds the equation
2+2=5, written in red chalk by a teacher who
vanished the week before. Ezekiel walks there at
dawn, not with a ballot, but with his kola nut.
He places it on the table beside the ink pot. He
says nothing. The man in khaki — a former
schoolmate who once sold him roasted yam — looks
at the nut, then at Ezekiel’s shoes, worn thin
at the heel. He takes the nut. Doesn’t eat it.
Slides it into a leather pouch marked “Election
Integrity.”
That night, Amara’s scholarship letter arrives —
unsigned, stamped “REJECTED: INCOMPLETE RECORDS.
” Ezekiel walks to the church. The pastor’s wife
is weeping. Her son, the choirboy, was found in
the river with his tongue cut out. The preacher
says it was witchcraft. Ezekiel knows it was the
ballot box. The kola nut was not a gift. It was
a bribe to the spirits that now own the state.
He goes home. Lights no lamp. Sits on the floor
where Amara used to do her sums. He eats the
last groundnut from his sack. The market is
quiet. No one sells kola nuts anymore. The new
law says only licensed vendors may sell native
goods — and Ezekiel’s license expired the day
the ballot boxes were sealed.
The next morning, a boy from the compound finds
him. Ezekiel is curled like a root pulled from
dry soil. His pocket is empty. The kola nut is
gone. The church bell rings once — for the dead,
for the stolen, for the children who will never
learn to read their own names on a school roll.
The oil boom has not yet come. But the hunger
has. And it is already eating the future.
