Felix Wilson is crushed into the window seat with bags piled high on his lap as the rammed bus bumps along its 14-hour journey from Calabar to Lagos.

“I work as a salesman in Lagos, but all my family are in Calabar,” he says. “That was where I was living when I registered, that's where I am supposed to vote.”

Mr Wilson, like thousands of Nigerians, dipped into savings and took time off work in order to travel home last Saturday.

Nigeria’s roads are at their busiest come election time as regulations demand voters return to the state where they first registered to cast their ballot.

The journeys - in a nation four times the size of the UK - can be marathon.

And they can be dangerous: Nigerian soldiers are on active deployment in 30 of the country’s 36 states, dealing with everything from Boko Haram in the far north to secessionists in the south.

Last Saturday , in one of the largest ever democratic exercises on the African continent, thousands of positions from the presidency to state legislature were due to be on the ballot paper.

Yet it was not to be.

Hours before the sun rose the country's Independent Electoral Commission (Inec) issued an 11th hour communique delaying the ballot for a week. They cited a number of reasons, including problems in delivering ballot papers.