By Prince Charles Dickson
There is a part of Jos, Oturkpo, and Maiduguri where you can sit with people who have survived violence, displacement, curfews, economic shocks, broken promises, and still hear the same phrase dressed in different clothes: we are coping. Not healing. Not recovering. Coping.
Some years ago, in a community conversation after yet another round of tension, a woman said something that has stayed with me far longer than many policy documents. She did not ask for peace in the polished language of conference halls. She simply said, “We have buried enough. We are tired of starting again from ashes.”
That sentence carries more policy intelligence than we often admit.
Nigeria increasingly lives in what might be called a perpetual aftermath. Communities do not fully recover before the next disruption arrives. Institutions do not consolidate reform before the next emergency distorts priorities. Citizens do not regain trust before another failure reminds them why they stopped trusting in the first place. We move from outbreak to intervention, from intervention to workshop, from workshop to report, and then back to outbreak. The cycle is familiar. The scars are cumulative.
This is where a trauma-informed critique of policy cycles becomes urgent.
Much of our governance architecture still assumes that crisis is episodic. It treats violence, displacement, inflation, communal fracture, and institutional breakdown as events to be managed and exited. But for many citizens, especially in fragile communities, crisis is not an interruption. It is the atmosphere. Policy, then, is often designed as if people are bouncing back, when in fact they are still bracing.
This has consequences.
When governments design post-conflict responses without accounting for fear, fatigue, memory, and social distrust, they mistake surface calm for recovery. When donors fund short cycles with long speeches about resilience, they may unintentionally reward visibility over repair. When practitioners are pushed to produce quick indicators, they can end up measuring activity in places where what is actually needed is slower, relational restoration.
The policy implication is uncomfortable but clear: recovery cannot be measured only by reopened roads, returned markets, or completed trainings. A community may be functioning and still be deeply unwell. A society may be stable on paper and still be living psychologically, politically, and economically inside its last unresolved wound.
So here is the question to practitioners and donors: What would change in how we design, fund, and evaluate interventions if we stopped assuming people had recovered simply because they had resumed?
Because resumption is not restoration. Movement is not healing. Silence is not peace.
And perhaps that is the quiet provocation here: maybe one of the greatest failures of policy in fragile societies is not that it responds too little, but that it repeatedly responds to consequences while leaving the condition of collective aftermath untouched.
We may need fewer declarations that recovery has begun, and more honesty about the fact that for many communities, it never truly did.
For those of us who work in governance, peacebuilding, development, and justice, this should trouble us enough to rethink what we call progress.
If this resonates with your field experience, I would value your reflections. Where have you seen communities “functioning” but not actually recovering?
c. PCD
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