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AbstractBackground: More than fifty years after the Nigeria–Biafra War, the wound has not closed -- it has been driven underground. Election seasons, separatist rhetoric, and security crackdowns often feel less like ordinary governance and more like institutional flashbacks to 1967–1970, as though certain political stimuli bypass deliberative reasoning and activate something older, more visceral, and largely unexamined (Musisi & Kinyanda, 2020). This pattern points toward what this paper terms National Post-War Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (NPW-PTSD): a heuristic organizing framework -- not a formal diagnostic category -- in which a country exhibits, at the level of institutional behavior and political culture, the intrusion, avoidance, negative cognition, and hyperarousal that clinical PTSD produces in the traumatized individual (Alexander, 2012; Hirschberger, 2018).Methods: Drawing on trauma science, African post-conflict psychiatry, comparative transitional justice scholarship, and Nigeria's institutional history, this paper proposes the National Truth and Trauma Commission (NTTC) as a structured, trauma-informed model for national psychological repair. The NTTC is organized into three phases -- stabilization and preparation; truth-telling and trauma processing; integration and community healing -- and six operational pillars: trauma-sensitive testimony collection; safe storytelling environments; national memorial infrastructure; a structured national apology framework; trauma-informed justice and security linkages; and community-level healing and follow-up (Staub et al., 2005). Each pillar is specified at the level of governance, staffing, and procedure, moving the model from conceptual framework to implementable design. Model architecture is illustrated in Figures 1 and 2.Results: Conceptually, the NTTC is designed to shift Nigeria from the silence, denial, and episodic inquiry that have characterized its post-war institutional posture toward a sustained process of acknowledgment, narrative integration, and post-traumatic growth (Neimeyer, 2019; Hirschberger, 2018). The model offers concrete pathways to reduce collective hypervigilance, competitive victimhood, and trauma-driven policy over-reaction, while rebuilding the institutional trust that sustained silence has progressively eroded (Bar-Tal et al., 2007; Noor et al., 2012).Conclusions: The NTTC reframes the truth commission concept as something more specific and more demanding than a moral ritual: a large-scale mental health intervention for a war-torn society whose wounds have been governing its politics from the shadows for more than half a century. By naming and structurally addressing NPW-PTSD, the model seeks to protect Nigeria's future from being quietly organized by an unfinished war (Musisi & Kinyanda, 2020; Alexander, 2012).