Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa by area and population, with 225 million people. The population was only 120 million in 2000. The economy has grown even faster, with GDP per person reaching $1,100 by 2025. While that is high for Africa, nearly half the population lives in poverty, barely getting by. One reason for this is the low literacy rate of 62 percent. This helps explain the high unemployment rate of over 30 percent. Endemic corruption means the national police are not only ineffective but part of the problem. Criminal activity is widespread and often intense. Currently, there has been a sharp increase in kidnapping for ransom. If you are wealthy, you can hire expensive but effective mercenaries to recover a kidnapping victim alive. Paying the ransom encourages the kidnappers to come after more members of your family. Hiring the mercenaries encourages the kidnappers to go after more vulnerable victims.

President Bola Tinubu recently indicated the army expansion was a direct response to a mass school kidnapping in his home region, the latest in a series of such attacks. Regardless, the groundbreaking decision could make Nigeria more secure. The expansion plan involves recruiting 28,000 soldiers and creating several new brigades and battalions to deal with regional unrest. Some troops will be trained at two new facilities built to expand the army’s recruitment capacity, and training has already begun. Tinubu also approved a huge pay increase from 30 to 80% for military personnel, as real wages declined because of high inflation.

One cause of unrest is religious differences. Only about three percent of Nigerian Moslems are Shia, but that comes to four million angry people. They have been angry for a long time, and in 1978 some of them formed a group of armed supporters called the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, or IMN. The plan was to overthrow the government and turn Nigeria into an Islamic state ruled by its tiny Shia minority. This was met with violent repression, and by 2019 IMN was banned, debilitated, and hunted down and killed wherever they were found. The bad reputation IMN earned came from a small radical faction that made the entire IMN look bad. IMN leaders could not control it, so the government went after the entire group.

The IMN was a minor problem in Nigeria where the much larger Sunni Boko Haram group attracted most of the government's armed attention. While government persecution ebbed, the local Sunni Islamic terrorists, the Islamic State in West Africa Province or ISWAP, decided that the haram, or unclean Shia IMN, was to be cleansed with gunfire and explosives. Today, only a few hundred IMN members remain. Now Iranian assistance has arrived to finish the job in their name.

And then there are the Iranians. Most Nigerian Shia believe in Western education and peaceful protests, and they face persecution from the Christian-dominated government and radical Sunni Nigerians. The arrival of Iranians did not help because most Nigerians are hostile to what Iran is doing to their neighbors and see nothing positive about Iranians seeking to assist Nigerian Shia. That assistance usually brings calamity upon the recipients. Any association with Iran, real or suspected, is nothing but trouble for the local Shia minority.