Buhari victory over President Goodluck Jonathan would be a rare upset for an incumbent in a country where petrodollars have long flowed and the presidency has great latitude to distribute them.
But oil prices have crashed; attacks on schools, markets and entire villages continue unabated; and Nigeria’s army has been thoroughly incapable of stopping Boko Haram, which now controls substantial portions of the northeast and regularly sends the country’s soldiers fleeing.
“We have to solve it; it’s the first problem of the country,” Mr. Buhari said tersely about the battle with Boko Haram during a long day of campaigning this week.
“This should have been an easy one,” added the former general, who is believed to have been a target of bombings in this city over the summer in which dozens were killed. “But it has been allowed to develop over five years.”
There is much at stake in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, even as it falters — the currency has dropped sharply, questions are swirling about the ability to pay civil servants and the country’s oil-money reserves have withered. The campaign has become a vociferous, at times violent, joust between Buhari partisans in the mostly Muslim north and supporters of Mr. Jonathan in the largely Christian south.
Mr. Buhari’s tenure as Nigeria’s military ruler was brief: a 20-month stint in the 1980s, ended by another military coup. Yet it is remembered with trepidation by many Nigerians.
His self-proclaimed “war against indiscipline” was carried to “sadistic levels, glorying in the humiliation of a people,” wrote the Nobel laureate and writer Wole Soyinka. Mr. Buhari forced tardy civil servants, even older ones, to perform frog jumps, jailed journalists for critical articles, and expelled tens of thousands of immigrants from other West African countries, blaming them for the country’s problems.
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The current president and his party, which has held power since military rule ended more than 15 years ago, have made this past a central part of Mr. Jonathan’s re-election strategy, hoping to fan old fears about the general.
Full-page newspaper ads suggest that Mr. Buhari is eager to introduce Shariah law all over the country, beyond the northern states where it already exists (in the campaign, Mr. Buhari has not said that).
Other ads remind readers of the retired general’s coup-prone past. (Historians say that even before Mr. Buhari came to power in a military coup at the end of 1983, he played an active role in the coups that marked Nigeria’s early years.)
But Mr. Buhari’s supporters are far more interested in the instability shaking the north, urging a total overhaul of the lackluster fight against the Islamists. Many of them turned out in this northern metropolis this week for a glimpse of the general, who has traded his medal-bedecked uniform for traditional robes and thick-framed spectacles.
