There's going to be an election in Nigeria in mid-February, and the weird thing is that it's not going to be all about Boko Haram. The Islamist terrorists are now killing people at the rate of at least 500 a month — two 9/11s a year, in a country with half the population of the United States — but most Nigerians seem to regard Boko Haram as just one more problem, and a fairly local one at that.
Up in the three northeastern provinces of the country, where Boko Haram has now declared that it is setting up an Islamic "caliphate" on the model of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, they do care about terrorism. They are also now starting to worry about it more in the rest of the north, where Boko Haram attacked the central mosque in Kano, the biggest northern city, last Friday, and killed at least a hundred people.
But in the rest of the country, the terrorist threat has not really risen to the top of the political agenda. The forthcoming election will not focus on the stunning incompetence and sheer inertia of President Goodluck Jonathan's government in the face of this threat.