Amina Okoye stepped off the Abujabound bus with
her certificate rolled tight under her arm and
her mother’s amulet burning hot against her ribs.
The oil boom had turned Lagos into a city of
neon prayers — pastors’ SUVs parked outside
Senate buildings, students chanting “We shall
overcome” while counting naira for their next
lecture. She was the first in her family to
graduate, but the curse whispered in Igbo she’d
forgotten: “When the ballot is stolen, the dead
rise to collect their due.” Her father, a
regional commissioner in ’63, had stuffed ballot
boxes in Onitsha with cash wrapped in Quranic
verses and palm oil — a move that won him a
ministerial post and silenced his brother’s
protest. That brother vanished into a river. Now,
in ’65, Amina’s own cousin, running for the same
seat, was being pushed out by a rigged vote.
The university campus smelled of burnt rubber
and incense. Students burned effigies of
politicians, but their fires didn’t reach the
real ones — the ones in the Electoral
Commission’s backroom, where ballot papers were
swapped with ones printed in Kano with ink mixed
from ground bone and dried iboga. Amina’s amulet
cracked on the third night. That’s when the
first votecounting clerk died — mouth full of
ash, eyes wide as if seeing a man walk out of a
river he’d been buried in ten years prior.
The rule was never spoken: If a living person
steals a vote tied to ancestral blood, the dead
must be paid in the same currency. Amina’s
father had paid with silence. Now, the dead
demanded payment in bodies.
On election eve, Amina went to the warehouse
where the ballots were stored. She didn’t burn
them. She didn’t steal them. She laid her
father’s old sash — the one he wore when he
stuffed the boxes — on the floor beside the pile.
Then she took her mother’s amulet, broke it open,
and poured the ash inside into the inkwell of
the ballot printer. The machine whirred, spat
out one last sheet — not a vote, but a name:
Okechukwu Okoye, her uncle, written in bloodink
that smelled of wet earth and bitter kola.
By dawn, the results were announced: Okechukwu
won. No one knew how. The clerks who counted
said they saw nothing but the wind move the
papers. The pastor’s daughter who’d helped rig
the vote collapsed midprayer, whispering, “He’s
here.”
Amina walked to the riverbank at dawn. The water
was calm. A single leaf floated — not from any
tree in Lagos. It was from the same fig tree
where her uncle vanished.
The curse didn’t end. It changed shape.
The vote was not stolen anymore. It was returned.
And the ancestors, for the first time since ’63,
were quiet.
