In this paper we study the number of rational points on curves in an ensemble of abelian covers of the projective line: let $\ell$ be a prime, $q$ a prime power and consider the ensemble ${\mathcal{H}}_{g,\ell }$ of $\ell$-cyclic covers of $\mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{F}_{q}}^{1}$ of genus $g$. We assume that $q\not \equiv 0,1~\text{mod}~\ell$. If $2g+2\ell -2\not \equiv 0~\text{mod}~(\ell -1)\operatorname{ord}_{\ell }(q)$, then ${\mathcal{H}}_{g,\ell }$ is empty. Otherwise, the number of rational points on a random curve in ${\mathcal{H}}_{g,\ell }$ distributes as $\sum _{i=1}^{q+1}X_{i}$ as $g\rightarrow \infty$, where $X_{1},\ldots ,X_{q+1}$ are independent and identically distributed random variables taking the values $0$ and $\ell$ with probabilities $(\ell -1)/\ell$ and $1/\ell$, respectively. The novelty of our result is that it works in the absence of a primitive $\ell$th root of unity, the presence of which was crucial in previous studies.