ìAfrika’s Director, Dr Toyin Ajao, was recently featured on PUNCH Nigeria, where she called on Nigerians to embrace community-centred empathy and trauma-informed solutions. In the interview, Dr Ajao analysed Nigeria’s security and social challenges through a trauma-informed lens.

She identified the country’s rising mental health challenges, estimated by the WHO at 20% of the population, as a direct effect of toxic sociocultural, economic, and political systems. These systems, she argued, operate in a perpetual state of survival mode and are fuelled by internalised prejudices.

Dr Ajao urged for a crucial national shift “from apathy to empathy,” emphasising that this change must inform “the way we talk to each other and treat one another, from micro family unit to macro leadership.”

She directly connected Nigeria’s heightened security problems to self-interest and a profound communal disconnection, stating, “We have forgotten our collective responsibility, communal accountability, reciprocity, and compassion. We are too polarised to embrace our collective humanity and tap into our ancestral knowledge and wisdom to restore our sense of unity, dignity, mutual respect and integrity.’’

Dr Ajao sounded a warning that Nigerians risk sinking “deeper into the abyss of collective destruction” if these deep-rooted issues are not addressed through collective healing, adding that she founded ìAfrika precisely to provide a holistic research and praxis avenue for this essential work of inner transformation as a community.

“I believe we are yet to heal from the colonial legacy,” she said, “to channel our energy towards inter-dependency and communality.”

Read the full feature on PUNCH Nigeria