Nigeria: An election under fire

Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan, has lived up to his name again. Three minutes after he left an election rally in the northern city of Gombe last week Monday, a suicide bomber blew herself up in the nearby parking lot. "The president had just passed the parking lot and we were trailing behind his convoy when the explosion happened," said a local witness, Mohammed Bolari. But Jonathan's luck held.

His rival for the presidency in the election on Feb. 14, former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari, also has his share of luck. Last July he barely escaped an assassination attempt in the northern city of Kaduna. As in Jonathan's case, the attack was almost certainly mounted by Boko Haram, the self-proclaimed affiliate of "Islamic State" that now rules an area about the size of Belgium in northeastern Nigeria.

Good luck for them, but it's not so easy to say that it was lucky for Nigeria. Africa's most populous country by far (180 million people) has a long history of dreadful presidents, but these two both rank quite high in that list.

Buhari has been president before. After a lengthy period of military rule, Nigeria got an elected civilian president in 1979 - who unfortunately proved to be spectacularly corrupt and incompetent. So in 1984 General Buhari seized power and imposed military discipline on the nation. The military then stayed in power for another fifteen years - but Buhari lasted only 20 months.

He jailed hundreds of politicians, officials and businessmen for corruption. Most were probably guilty, but he didn't bother with proof. As part of his "War on Indiscipline," he ordered Nigerians to form neat queues at bus stops, and sent whip-wielding soldiers to enforce the order. Civil servants who were late for work were...