The Case for Empathetic Leadership in Post-Conflict Nigerian Communities

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An Article by Ajibola Oladiipo, 2025 EPLF Fellow

The children of the poor you fail to train today will never let your children have peace.

~ Obafemi Awolowo

Our attitude toward the burdens others carry mirrors the depth of our responsibility as citizens and leaders. Pa Awolowo’s words remind us that neglecting the education and welfare of the vulnerable is not merely a governance failure but a betrayal of our future. Wounds left untreated inevitably return to haunt both the privileged and the powerless.

This is why governance in Nigeria’s broken places must move beyond ceasefires. From the villages of Plateau to the oil-slicked creeks of the Niger Delta, violence leaves scars not only on land but also on civic trust and the State’s legitimacy. These wounds won’t heal through technical fixes. They cannot mend what violence has broken in human relationships. A bridge may reconnect towns, but only trust reconnects people.

Our communities need stewards, not saviours. Leaders who listen, heal, and restore dignity. Empathy is not weakness but a deliberate choice that prioritizes listening over decrees, healing over optics, and reconciliation over electoral gains. Though often dismissed in our politics as performance, history shows empathy heals. Mandela knew this when he wore the Springboks jersey in 1995, binding pain and fear in a shared future.

Listening is not passive; it is active governance. Listening gathers intelligence beyond policy briefs: fears, hopes, grievances hidden beneath silence or wrapped in anger. Empathetic leaders don’t govern from reports alone. They attend town halls, peace dialogues, and unmediated conversations where communities speak their truth in their own language.

In places where machetes once spoke louder than ballots, a leader who cannot feel people’s pain cannot govern peaceably. Empathy does not weaken firmness; it sharpens it. In compassionate hands, power becomes a scalpel, not a cudgel. It is humane and restorative. It makes the difficult conversations necessary for reconciliation possible: between herders and farmers, displaced persons and hosts, survivors and returnees.

Some say empathy has no place in Nigeria’s tough politics, that security must come first, not dialogue. They see empathy as weakness. But empathy is no substitute for security or reform; it strengthens them. Without trust, no project or policy endures. Governor Mimiko’s tenure in Ondo, while engaging the oil-producing communities of Ilaje and Ese-Odo, demonstrated how inclusion of women’s cooperatives, local militias, and traditional councils transformed adversaries into stakeholders. His administration’s maternal health interventions were more than public health policy. They were political gestures of empathy to restore the state’s image as a caregiver.

Leadership in post-conflict Nigeria demands investment in peace education and trauma counseling. It requires leaders who see beyond ethnic arithmetic to the deeper work of stitching torn social fabrics. These yield no immediate political dividends but prevent future bloodshed. Governance at its best is stewardship of trust, memory, and futures yet unborn.

The real question for Nigeria’s future leaders is not how to wield power, but how to heal with it. Only then can power become redemptive, transformative, and leadership truly worthy of those it serves.

Ajibola Oladiipo

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