November 27, 2025: The most recent problems involve the American president threatening to send troops into Nigeria to protect endangered Nigerian Christians. The American troops never appeared but Nigerian politicians are accusing each other of encouraging the Americans to intervene. Closer to home there was a scandal when it was revealed that Islamic terrorist Boko Haram members and common criminals had tried to join the army. Some may have managed to join and the army has been called on to investigate the allegations.

The oil-rich west coast African nation of Nigeria continues to have problems with Islamic terrorist groups Boko Haram, and especially the local Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/ISIL faction known as Islamic State West Africa Province/ISWAP. The latest disaster was a May 4, 2025, ISWAP attack on an army camp in northeastern Yobe State. This attack featured the ISWAP use of motorbikes instead of 4x4 vehicles. Yobe State terrain is flat with little cover. ISWAP found motorbikes more effective than larger vehicles. The attack left four soldiers dead and many more wounded. ISWAP gunmen vandalized part of the camp for several hours. They got away with weapons, ammunition and other supplies.

So far this year several thousand civilians and soldiers have been killed or wounded by tribal raids and Islamic terrorists . This carnage is largely confined to northern states like Borno, Yobe, Kano, and Kaduna. Total deaths throughout Nigeria in the 21st Century have been about 15,000 dead and 60,000 wounded or injured.

ISWAP has stuck with its strategy of concentrating on the security forces and doing so by assembling a large enough number of gunmen to ensure, most of the time, a quick victory. The continued prevalence of corruption and incompetent officers in the army has contributed to continued chaos and lawlessness in northern Borno State, where most of the population was displaced by Boko Haram violence in 2014-15, though Boko Haram control was broken by 2017. After that government programs to revive the economy and restore law and order collapsed under the usual corruption and incompetence of local officials and security forces. Even a reform-minded president who was a former general and Moslem was unable to push military reforms far enough and fast enough. Boko Haram is not winning; but the government is failing to finish off a defeated Boko Haram and take advantage of an opportunity to regain the trust and loyalty of the local population. ISIL took advantage of similar conditions to quickly overrun more than a third of Iraq in 2014. Many Nigerian leaders are well aware of how that worked but the corruption is so entrenched and widespread that reform moves slowly and that left the army and government officials vulnerable to a well-organized Boko Haram comeback.

ISWAP is also known as the Barnawi or AL Barnawi faction of Boko Haram. ISWAP has apparently received a lot of useful technical and tactical advice from ISIL veterans of fighting in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Boko Haram persists in the northeast in large part because of its willingness to experiment, innovate and take advice from foreign ISIL veterans. The Barnawi faction follows the current ISIL doctrine of concentrating attacks on security forces and government officials, preferably the corrupt ones. That makes it easier to extort more cash and other goods from the local population.

Six years ago the Barnawi faction had over 3,000 active gunmen and operated mainly in the far north of Borno state near Lake Chad and the borders of Niger and Chad. The smaller Shekau faction has about half as many armed men and operates further south near the Borno State capital of Maiduguri and the Sambisa Forest. Both factions rely on the fact that the years of Boko Haram violence in Borno State, where Boko Haram originated in 2004, has increased the poverty and corruption the Islamic terrorist organization was founded to eliminate. Many potential recruits are discouraged by stricter standards and a more fanatic approach of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Compared to the original Boko Haram, the most hard core Islamic radicals are drawn to the more extreme groups and that way Boko Haram persists.

Current ISWAP strength is closer to 4,000 fighters. Boko Haram is still around, with fewer gunmen than ISWAP. Both of these Islamic terrorist organizations have been fighting each other since 2021. The army has taken advantage of this, but corruption and frequent incompetence have enabled the Islamic terrorist groups to continue surviving. The government has tried to exploit the Islamic terrorists’ civil war.

Back in 2020 some army commanders in the northeastern Borno State tried to blame foreign Non-Government Organizations/NGOs for providing a steady flow of reports, documented with pictures and videos showing army misbehavior and mistreatment of civilians. The foreigners were also accused of spying for Boko Haram and deliberately spreading false reports of army misbehavior to hurt the morale of troops and loyalty of local civilians. These accusations tended to be quickly withdrawn when senior officers back in the national capital heard of it. The generals in the high command knew the NGO reports were true because these reports were often quietly double-checked by high command investigators. Such retractions were just another reminder of the problems the military faced and were unable to fix, in the northeast.

Another aspect of the Boko Haram violence in the northeast is the continuing battles between farmers and herders in northern and central Nigeria, and the fact that most of the victims are Christians killed deliberately. In 2018 about 2,400 Christians were killed in northern and central Nigeria. Since 2015 over 20,000 Christians have been killed, most of them deliberately sought out and murdered by Boko Haram. There is growing pressure from Nigerian Christians, largely in the south as well as foreign nations with Christian majorities, for Nigeria to put an end to this religious persecution. It is definitely persecution when Boko Haram does it as seeking out and killing non-Moslems is an acknowledged goal of Boko Haram. The current American president has threatened to send U.S. troops into Nigeria to halt the attacks on Nigerian Christians. This is unlikely to happen, but it does spotlight the large number of Nigerian Christians being slaughtered by Nigerian Moslems. This carnage rarely appears in Western medi

The farmer versus herder violence in northern and central Nigeria is mainly about land and who controls it. While the herders are often militant Fulani Moslems, most of the farmers they battle within the north are also Moslem. But many Fulani agree with and often join Boko Haram about how killing non-Moslems is what devout Moslems should do as often as possible. Most of the farmers killed by Fulani are Christians and in some years the Fulani herders killed more Christians in Nigeria than did Boko Haram.

President Buhari recently went to Borno state and met with the governor, who pleaded for Buhari to persuade the army to allow expanded use of local defense volunteers. With the decline in Boko Haram activity in the last year, about a third of the force has been disbanded or at least no longer recognized and supported by the military. About two percent of those who joined CJTF have been killed and many more have been wounded or injured while on duty. In effect, about ten percent of the CJTF men have been injured. But the soldiers respect them and the local civilians depend on and support them, while Boko Haram has come to fear them. The more senior army commanders do not support the CJTF because these civilians often confront misbehaving soldiers and embarrass the army by exposing such bad behavior.

Volunteers initially received little material support from the government. But in early 2013 Boko Haram began to notice that in Borno and Yobe states thousands of Moslem and Christian young men were enthusiastically joining the CJTF to provide security from Boko Haram violence and provide information to the security forces about who Boko Haram members were and where they were living. That trend continued and the CJTF and self-defense groups, in general, became the greatest threat to Boko Haram in rural areas as well as the cities. The CJTF frequently patrol remote areas and operate a growing network of trusted informants who can quickly phone in detail on local Boko Haram activity.

Eventually Boko Haram openly declared war on CJTF and threatened to kill any of them they could find. That state of war continued for several years while Boko Haram was no longer controlling large territories and was less of a threat to CJTF members and their families. The army came to depend less on the CJTF, which preferred to operate with heavily armed police or soldiers nearby ready to move in to arrest Boko Haram suspects the vigilantes identify or help fight back if Boko Haram attacked. Eventually the army was regularly using the volunteers to replace troops at checkpoints. This policy enabled more checkpoints to be set up and more thorough searches of vehicles to be conducted. This made it more difficult for Boko Haram to move around, plan and carry out attacks or to resupply the few men they still had in the cities. Boko Haram responded by attacking checkpoints more frequently and that led to many volunteers getting weapons, officially or otherwise sometimes with the help of soldiers or police. The c

Early on some CJTF groups were launching attacks on Boko Haram and usually winning because they knew the area and people better, and often were even able to launch surprise attacks at night. A major factor in this was that in the more remote areas, like near the Sambisa Forest, the CJTF groups contained a lot of local hunters. These men are professional hunters who thrive in rural areas where there is a lot more game than people. CJTF first demonstrated to the army the skills of local hunters who tracked game for a living. The army noted that the success of CJTF attack units was largely because of local hunters. Soon the army began to hire some of the hunters who were exceptional trackers as well as offering bounties if they could track down certain Boko Haram men or groups. At first Boko Haram fought back and attacked trackers or their families. That backfired because the CJTF had better information about their home areas which made it difficult for Boko Haram to make revenge attacks. The attacks were made

CJTF/Civilian Joint Task Force strength peaked at about 30,000 volunteers in 2017. The military never liked to publicize how important the CJTF, and civilian support in general, was to the defeat of Boko Haram but the truth got out anyway and the civilian volunteers eventually received more credit for their contributions. This media attention also revealed that the military had recruited over a hundred of the most effective CJTF informants into a special unit where these men work full time for the military as plainclothes agents who are sent to an area where Boko Haram is believed to be active or trying to be and collect information. In some areas of Borno State, the CJTF was not all that useful and that was in the many towns and villages where everyone, or nearly everyone, fled the Boko Haram violence and there were few people left. Many of these refugees have yet to return and parts of northeast and eastern Borno State are depopulated battlefields for the remaining Boko Haram and the army. These depopulated areas are now a sanctuary for many Boko Haram groups.

The Borno governor wants the army to expand the CJTF from its current 20,000 members. That might happen. The governor also wants more competent officers for the troops in Borno but that is still a work in progress.

And then there is the oil. That’s because what is even more important to most Nigerians is the economy. The biggest problems there are the oil and natural gas sector. A 2018 World Bank study detailed how Nigerian governments wasted opportunities from 1970 through 2014 to invest a trillion dollars of oil income into development. Instead, most was stolen or squandered. For 44 years, there were five spikes in oil prices and demand. These oil booms brought in extraordinary amounts of income, most of which made a few corrupt politicians fabulously rich and did nothing for Nigeria.

Oil has been a curse, not a blessing, for Nigeria and one thing nearly all Nigerians can agree on is reducing corruption and theft of oil income. Since 1972 the government has earned over $1,300 billion in oil revenue. Between 1960 and 2005 most of it was stolen by corrupt politicians. This was the cause of much unrest. Most Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day. Since the 1980s the oil money has been going to less than twenty percent of the population, leaving everyone else worse off than before the oil exports began. People in the Niger Delta are angry because most of them did not benefit and suffered from the oil spills and oil extraction ills. Infrastructure is ruined.

Oil exports still matter, despite the price falling by more than half and never really recovering. Oil still accounts for most of exports and the federal budget. The government tried to count the losses in the oil industry. Losses from corruption through 2005 were $20 trillion. Annual theft and pipeline damage was over $10 billion a year. Annual GDP was $447 billion, 199 million people who must live on $2,300 a year. Oil accounts for 40 percent of GDP.

The government is going after Chinese citizens who continue to use Nigeria as a base for economic crimes throughout Africa. The Chinese ambassador in Nigeria assured the locals that China was cooperating in identifying and prosecuting Chinese citizens based in Nigeria and committing crimes. China is Nigeria’s largest trading partner and that large volume of trade is what brought Chinese gangsters and independent criminal entrepreneurs to Nigeria. China is currently owed over $5 billion by various Nigerian businesses and individuals. Nigeria is the major African exporter of oil and Chine is one of the top ten buyers.

At the same time, Nigeria has a lot of other problems. At the end of 2024 fighting broke out in central Nigeria, with several dead and many more wounded. Fulani raiders continue to attack farmers with abandon. Soldiers are unable to be everywhere at once to stop the raiders. There are similar trouble spots throughout central and northern Nigeria.

Despite the problems in the north, Nigeria is prospering, driven by increasing oil income from oil fields in the south. All sectors of the economy are improving. President Tinubu has been in office since March 2023, and concentrated on his pledges to reduce corruption in the Nigerian government. One of his first acts was to order an audit of the central bank to be followed by an audit of the federal payroll. The current economic crisis has made endemic and epidemic corruption more visible. This is very visible in the oil production industry, which has greatly inflated costs because of corruption. Higher oil prices are canceled by declines in production caused by criminals and corruption. Corruption inflates the cost of everything and reduces the quality of work done by the government, especially when it comes to infrastructure.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, who served as president from 1963 to 1966, was one of the key people in obtaining independence for Nigeria from British colonial rule. What is now Nigeria was a collection of separate kingdoms and tribal territories that Britain got involved with after it outlawed slavery in 1807 and began a decades-long campaign to suppress the slave trade between African tribes and the Americas. Slavery was an ancient custom in most of Africa but American and European demand for more slaves led to more powerful tribes attacking weaker tribes to capture them as slaves for sale to American and European slave traders.

In 1861 Britain took control of some portions of the Nigerian coast to deal with persistent slaving by inland tribes. Twenty years later Britain had control over more territory and installed a colonial government. This led, over the next 80 years, to Nigerian nationalism and talented men like Nnamdi Azikiwe working for independence. When the 1960s Igbo rebellion broke out, he advised the Igbo government for a few years before switching back to the Nigerian government.

After independence the biggest problem was corruption fed by the growing oil wealth coming from the oil fields in the southern Niger River Delta. It was later calculated that about a trillion dollars of oil income was stolen between the 1960s and the present.

Back in 2004, Islamic terrorist violence in the northeast appeared and created some lasting problems. There are still millions of refugees plus substantial economic damage in the northeastern Borno State, where it all began. There seems to be no end in sight because of corruption, but more competent leadership in the security forces reduced the violence. All this was caused by a local group of Taliban wannabes calling themselves Boko Haram. In English Boko Haram means that English Education is forbidden. Most Nigerians abhor the nihilistic Boko Haram and see this group as a threat to peace, prosperity and economic growth.

Boko Haram activity in the capital of Borno State grew for a decade until in 2014 it seemed unstoppable. It took over a year for the government to finally muster sufficient military strength to cripple but not destroy Boko Haram. This did not get much media attention outside Africa, even though in 2014 Boko Haram killed more people than ISIL/Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant did in Syria and Iraq. The main reason for Boko Haram gains in 2014 and 2015 was corruption in the army, which severely crippled effective counterterror efforts. By itself Boko Haram was too small to have much impact on a national scale but the inability to deal with this problem put a spotlight on the corruption that has hobbled all progress in Nigeria for decades.

A new president, a former general who is Moslem, was elected in early 2015 and made progress in changing the army’s corrupt culture, but that is still a work in progress even though he was reelected in early 2019. More bad news was expected because of too many tribal feuds and too much corruption creating growing unrest throughout the country, which led to reduced oil income and further disputes over that, etc. This is especially bad down south in the oil producing region, the Niger River Delta. Violence against oil facilities continues. Worse, local politicians and business leaders had taken over the oil theft business.

Northern Moslems want more control over the federal government and the oil money. In northern and central Nigeria there is increasing violence as nomadic Moslem herders move south and clash with largely Christian farmers over land use and water supplies. For the last few years these tribal feuds have killed more people than Boko Haram. The situation is still capable of sliding into regional civil wars, over money and political power. Corruption and ethnic/tribal/religious rivalries threaten to trigger, at worst, another civil war and at least more street violence and public anger.

That brought Iranian interest in Nigeria. Over the last year Iran has lost most of its groups of armed supporters that it has subsidized and armed. Some of these Iran-backed groups have been around for decades. In the last year Hamas, Hezbollah and various other factions have disappeared because of local and Israeli attacks. It will be a few years, perhaps even a decade before Iran can return to local haunting grounds. The Iranian Quds force, which specializes in stirring up trouble outside Iran, has been looking for new hunting ground and found one in Nigeria. Only half the population of Nigeria is Moslem. The other half is largely Christian, better educated and paid, and occupy the most government, military and commercial important jobs, The local Moslems resent this and the Shia minority in the Moslem community resent it most of all.

Iran is the largest Shia majority nation in the world and considers itself the champion of oppressed Shia everywhere. Shia in nations near Iran no longer want Iranian help because that assistance often backfires, with the local Shia taking most of the casualties and blame. So Iran went seeking other Shia communities to uplift and hopefully be grateful to Iran’s mullah regime. This led Iran to Nigeria which had been untouched by Iranian assistance.

Nigeria is the largest country in the sub-Saharan Desert in terms of area and population, with 225 million people. The population was only 120 million in 2000. The economy has grown even faster, with per-person GDP reaching $4,000 by 2024.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. That explains the high unemployment rate of over 30 percent. Endemic corruption means the national police is 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.

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 was the work of a small radical faction who 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. Currently there are only a few hundred active IMN members left. Now Iranian assistance has arrived to finish the job in the name of protecting them.

Most Nigerian Shia believe in western education and peaceful protests against the persecution they receive 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.