Ayanfe Edun

Understanding Kemi: A Mirror to Our National Trauma Many who rush online to attack Kemi do so not from reasoned critique, but from a place of deep, unexamined trauma. It’s hard to blame them. If you've lived in Nigeria all your life, you may never truly understand what trauma is — because it's woven into everyday life. It’s in the classrooms, where humiliation is masked as discipline. It’s in homes, where silence is enforced and emotional neglect is normal. It’s on the streets, where motorists are routinely harassed at checkpoints by men wielding automatic rifles with twitchy fingers. It’s in the police, the markets, the churches, the news — a constant thrum of fear, dysfunction, and unresolved pain. When you grow up surrounded by this, it becomes your baseline. You don’t even know you’re carrying trauma. You’re just “living.” Kemi didn’t escape that. She has spoken of a time when police officers stole from her brother — a formative experience. She has described what it felt like to live in an environment where armed officers, instead of offering safety, stood at roadblocks like predators, intimidating ordinary citizens. These are not isolated events. They are fragments of a larger, national dysfunction that too many Nigerians accept as normal. That is why I will never blame Kemi. Nigeria was a deeply traumatic beginning for her. And whether or not people agree with her politics today, there is no denying that her rise — from a childhood shaped by fear and dysfunction to leading the T'ories— is remarkable. Even if that’s the highest office she ever holds, she has still defied odds that many of her critics have not begun to confront. Because while some sit comfortably behind screens, flinging insults at her for daring to criticize Nigeria, they miss the point: she’s saying what many of us whisper when the power goes out, when the police pull us over, when a relative dies because a hospital has no doctor. Kemi’s words may sting — but often, truth does. And if her voice unsettles us, maybe it’s because she’s holding up a mirror to a country that never taught its people how to process pain — only how to survive it.