Both the governor and the president were obviously under competing pressures from several constituencies, but they resisted them and chose to throw their weight behind a candidate from a part of the state that has never produced a governor since the state's creation in 1967 and that has remained in its geographic, political and symbolic margins ever since.

It is gratifying that a wide swath of people from the state recognise the imperative of the inclusion of its most peripheral part into the mainstream. After the publication of my April 18 column, countless people from Ilorin Emirate reached out to me to say they saw merit in my arguments and were committed to remediation.

It still honestly and pleasantly shocks me that so many people from Ilorin Emirate concede that the remainder of Borgu in Kwara State should produce the next governor of the state.

My pleasant surprise springs from my knowledge that it takes conscious effort to acknowledge that you are the beneficiary of unfair advantages and to willingly let go of those advantages. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to be on the same page on this issue, but my sense is that the vast majority of people in both Ilorin Emirate and Kwara South are sold on this.

Perhaps it's not altogether out of place that most people in Ilorin Emirate support the shift of power to the North. After all, they have produced the governor for 19 of the 27 years since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999.

Plus, many Ilorin indigenes, my younger sister's husband being an example, have distant Borgu ancestral roots, even if they are now, for all practical purposes, Yoruba people, and therefore may have some emotional investment in the emergence of a Borgu person as governor.

But the fact that many prominent and not-so-prominent people from Kwara South are on board is the bigger pleasant surprise for me. Kwara South has had only one 8-year shot at the governorship since 1999. That many of them think conceding the governorship to a part of the state that has never produced a governor for even a split second is worthwhile is commendable.

You won't appreciate what I am driving at until you realise that there are many multi-ethnic states in Nigeria where just one ethnic group dominates the governorship in perpetuity.

An example that stands out like a sore thumb is Benue State. Since the state's creation in 1976, every elected civilian governor has come from the Tiv-speaking part of the state. The governorship has never gone to Idoma, Igede or any other non-Tiv group in a civilian election. So, every child in Benue who isn't Tiv has little reason to imagine that they could someday become governor.

In complex, transitional, multi-ethnic and plural countries like Nigeria, conscious efforts should be made to formalise strategies for the symbolic inclusion of all collective identities in governance structures. That is the only way people can relate to governance and feel a vicarious identification with power and authority.

It obviously is not a substitute for good governance, accountability, transparency, performance and improvement in the lot of the people, but it's an indispensable precondition for getting every citizen invested in the business of government.

Kwara has now shown that even in a country where exclusion often masquerades as democracy and "meritocracy", power can still be made to travel to the margins when conscience, pressure and enlightened self-interest meet.