They're ranking up because of their activeness in the general board, Nigerians are one of the most active/quality members on the forum and that's reflecting on the rate at which they're ranking up. Many of them have left the local because there's no much merit there. And those who spend most of their time on the board don't get merited as much  as they'll do on the main board because 1, I'm the only merit source and 2, low source merit. I saw you have 1k+ monthly and I barely have over 120+ meanwhile we have over 1k posts monthly on the board and that means only 100+ (quality posts) of those can be merited (that's if I send only 1 merit each for each quality posts that I come across).

I have message theymos severally and when he was giving us the local baord I talked with him about the merit condition because that has been my allocation before the local board was created but his reply was that the forum isn't looking to add more merit to circulation and that's just frustrating to the local board but what can we do, most times I even keep my smerits earned from merit received for the baord just to keep the energy high on the board.