Healing from THE UNFINISHED WAR: The Untreated War Trauma Holding Nigeria Hostage—and How to Heal It.

The Nigerian–Biafran War officially ended in 1970. For millions of Nigerians, it never really did.

Healing from the Unfinished War argues that the civil war did not simply destroy cities and lives; it rewired the country’s nervous system. Drawing on frontline psychiatric practice, trauma science, and decades of listening to survivors, Dr. Luke Chike Igweobi shows how siege, starvation, massacres, and enforced silence left behind a national population still living inside an untreated injury.

Rather than retelling the war as politics or military strategy, this book reads Nigeria as a patient. It traces how unprocessed fear and grief from 1967–1970 now appear in everyday civic life: hypervigilant security reflexes, inflammatory electioneering, distrust of institutions, and the recurring panic that “another Biafra” is always just around the corner. Through clinical lenses such as National Population‑Wide Post‑Traumatic Stress Disorder (NPW‑PTSD), Dr. Igweobi explains why old slogans—No victor, no vanquished—could never substitute for real healing.

Blending case vignettes, history, and neuroscience, the book:

• Gives language to the lingering wounds of war in families, communities, and national institutions
• Shows how trauma passes from one generation to the next, shaping identity and democratic behavior
• Examines the justice system, policing, and elections as mirrors of unhealed fear
• Proposes a National Truth and Trauma Commission (NTTC) as a structured path toward acknowledgment, memorialization, and repair

Written for clinicians, policymakers, scholars, and citizens, Healing from the Unfinished War offers more than diagnosis. It sketches what treatment could look like for a country that has lived too long with a shaking hand and a tight throat.

For anyone asking why Nigeria’s present still feels haunted by its past—and what it would take to finally let the next generation live in a country that is no longer afraid of its own history—this book provides a clinically grounded, deeply human answer.

Dr. Luke Chike Igweobi, DNP, MS, PMHNP‑BC, is a psychiatric trauma specialist, collective‑trauma scholar, and war‑trauma investigator whose work examines how unprocessed mass violence shapes national psychology, institutional behavior, and long‑term security outcomes. A Nigerian‑American, he approaches the Biafran War as a trauma‑science–driven study in collective wounding, showing how national silence after mass violence can embed fear, mistrust, and hypervigilance across an entire society. He is a board‑certified psychiatric–mental health clinician with a clinical career rooted in high‑acuity psychiatric settings in the United States and serves as Executive and Clinical Director of ofhUSA.org and Director of its International Truth & Trauma Institute (ITTI), where he helped develop the International Trauma Classification System (ITCS) and advises governments on designing National Truth and Trauma Commissions. He holds a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) from New Mexico State University and completed graduate‑level professional training in environmental policy and international development at Harvard University.