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 on 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 north-eastern Nigeria.