The BBC interviewed Lawan Ibrahim and other eligible voters to find out how they will cast their votes on the election days of Saturday April 14 and Saturday April 21.

"The current government has not in any way improved my life despite being in power for eight years. That is why I'm going to vote. I am going to vote someone who won't forget people like me as soon as he becomes a big man," Mallam Lawan Ibrahim told the BBC.

Lawan Ibrahim speaks for the common person in the most populous country in Africa and the eighth largest producer of crude oil, where endemic corruption and decades of maladministration have stymied the progress of human development.
Nigeria claims to have more than $40 billion in external reserve and less than $5 billion in foreign debt, but as rightly noted by The Guardian newspaper of Nigeria on January 31, 2007, Nigeria has been unable to use her wealth to transform the lives of the majority of her teeming population of over 140 million people. Nigeria ranks low even among poor countries of the world and in infant mortality, she shares the bottom of the table with Chad, Niger, Haiti, and Cambodia and in maternal mortality, Nigeria is at par with Haiti and worse than neighbouring Niger.

The historic April polls will mark the first transfer of power by a civil administration to another. But the President of Nigeria and the Chairman of Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have been accused and dragged to court for manipulating the Electoral Commission to truncate the ambition of the opposition parties and use the power of incumbency for the arrogation and elongation of tenure. They said the government and INEC have been conspiring to jeopardize the chances of the opposition parties at the polls and have subverted many court cases on the qualification of political opponents of the ruling party.

How can Lawan Ibrahim vote for the political candidates he wants to vote for when INEC has barred them from contesting for elective posts? And millions of Nigerian voters are now left in dilemma, because their preferred political candidates have been ruled out of the elections.

The spate of kidnappings of foreign oil workers and violent attacks in the Niger Delta region and political riots at campaign rallies are indicators of the state of insecurity and instability in Nigeria. The environment is not conducive to peaceful elections and the government has failed to maintain law and order. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) reported that robbers have hijacked three truckload of election materials and the election materials were meant for the governorship and state House of Assembly election holding on Saturday April 14, 2007.