Alex Thurston over at Sahel Blog has an excellent take on the credentials of the two leading candidates in the Nigerian election – the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and challenger Muhammadu Buhari. Thurston, in particular, cautions against simplistic narratives about either candidate that only serve to distract from the universe of issues at stake in this election:

In much international coverage of the race, whether by non-Nigerian journalistsor Nigerians speaking to international audiences, the two candidates have been presented in crude and one-dimensional ways. The narrative at work in such commentaries says that Jonathan is a bumbler – a nice guy perhaps, but ultimately an “accidental president” who is in over his head, too incompetent to deal with problems like corruption or the violence caused by Boko Haram in the northeastern part of the country. Meanwhile, the same narrative tells us that Buhari is a thug – an essentially military man whose record is fatally tarnished by his regime’s actions in the 1980s, and whose prospects for winning the presidency have grown only because of Nigerians’ anxieties about Boko Haram. The narrative goes on to say that Nigerians face two very bad choices for president – perhaps implying that “the devil they know” is the better choice.

The rest of the blog post is here (highly recommended).

In related news Nigeria’s INEC on Tuesday announced that it had hit a 75% PVC issuance rate (or around 52 million people) to the almost 67 million registered voters. This included an average issuance rate of 76% in the three states worst hit by the Boko Haram insurgency (Yobe, Adamawa, and Borno).