Eze Okoro walks the back alleys of Surulere with

a gourd of bitter leaf and seven cowrie shells

strapped to his waist, the only sign he still

answers to the old ways while the city burns

with new money. Modern Lagos has no room for

healers who speak to spirits — only pastors with

microphones and doctors with white coats, but

Eze knows the truth: the oil that gushed from

the Niger Delta didn’t just fill bank accounts,

it poisoned the soil where ancestors sleep.

When the son of Chief Okafor — a man who built

his fortune on shell companies and stolen oil

contracts — collapses with a fever no hospital

can name, Eze is called in through a back door,

bribed with a briefcase of naira notes folded

tight like prayers. The boy’s body is cold, his

breathing shallow, his skin marked with purple

blotches no medicine explains. Eze doesn’t ask

why they chose him. He knows. The oil men’s

children still dream of the old gods they were

taught to forget.

He sets up his altar in the mansion’s storeroom,

beneath a framed picture of the president

shaking hands with a foreign oil executive. He

burns kola nut and palm oil, chants in Igbo to

the spirits of the earth, and presses his palms

to the boy’s chest — not to heal, but to

transfer. The world mechanism changed when the

oil came: the land no longer forgives. Every

fortune built on its blood must be paid in kind.

The boy opens his eyes. Cries. Sits up. Eze’s

left hand is now black as burnt rubber, the skin

cracked and peeling like dried mud after the

Harmattan. He does not scream. He does not weep.

He takes the briefcase and walks out.

Three days later, the ground beneath Okafor’s

new oil depot in Port Harcourt cracks open. Not

from pressure. Not from poor engineering. From

roots — thick, black, and gnarled — rising like

veins from the earth, swallowing pipes, crushing

pumps, swallowing the men who tried to dig

deeper.

Eze returns to his village near Awka. He does

not speak. His wife brings him water. His

children avoid his hand. He sits by the

ancestral shrine, now cracked and silent. The

cowrie shells on his waist have turned to ash.

On the seventh night, the village elder finds

him kneeling before the shrine, pressing his

ruined hand into the soil. The earth takes it.

By dawn, the first yam sprouts from the grave

where Eze’s father was buried — green, thick,

and sweet as sugar cane. The whole village eats

it. No one falls sick.

No one speaks of the healer again.

But the oil wells near Enugu begin to run dry.

And the land remembers.