President Goodluck Jonathan had other ideas. He felt the proper way to start the investigation was to completely exonerate the chief suspects, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND).
The various militias under the MEND umbrella have prevented the people of the Niger-Delta from exercising their constitutional rights to democracy, by helping PDP politicians rig elections. They have hired out their muscle to different political machine bosses who are fighting (literally) to control territories to use as bargaining chips during election time. If you control a patch of land (and the rigging process in that patch of land), you can offer the "votes" you control to federal or regional politicians in exchange for favours -- which is why the PDP has regularly "won" elections in Rivers and Bayelsa with over 90% of the "vote".
When there is no election imminent, the militia of MEND engage in the lucrative activities of oil bunkering and kidnapping. Indeed, oil bunkering activities by MEND and MEND-like militia have increased the amount of oil pollution in the Delta. It is interesting that a group that claims to be fighting against the despoilation of the Delta is now responsible for the majority of the environmental damage in the Delta.
But I digress.
Goodluck Jonathan's reasons for exempting MEND from suspicion are essentially the following:
(a)He is from the Niger-Delta.
(b) No one is more Niger-Deltan than him.
(c) His country home is near an oil well.
(d) His people like the government and appreciate the government's work on their behalf.
(e) His people would never blow up their chances of further enjoying the government's work.
(f) So therefore, he concludes MEND is not guilty of planting the car bombs.
First of all, when Jonathan made these statements, there had not been enough time for our admittedly poor investigative agencies to have come up with any evidence-backed theories about who was or wasn't responsible for the crime.
Second of all, Jonathan himself had no evidence-backed reason for including or excluding anybody or any entity.
Understand, I am not saying MEND are definitely guilty, nor am I saying MEND are definitely innocent. I am saying there was no evidentiary basis for the security agencies or President Jonathan to make a conclusive judgement one way or the other.
The only thing we knew was "MEND" had issued a warning beforehand, and had taken responsibility afterward ... which means at the very least that among the different potential theories the security agencies must look at is the theory that it was MEND. A good starting point would be to confirm or refute the authenticity of the warning and the message taking responsibility.
But Goodluck Jonathan stepped in before any investigation could be done, to declare MEND was innocent. Not because he had proof that the warning and message of responsibility were hoaxes. Not because he had proof that someone else had done it ....
... no, he exonerated MEND because he is from the Niger-Delta and he knows "his people" wouldn't plant car bombs.
This is a dangerous for someone in his position to say in a country that has long had a problem with an ideology of (in)justice that revolves around the assignation of collective responsibility, collective guilt and collective punishment on entire groups for the crimes of a few individuals who happen to share a common sociocultural origin as the members of that ethnic group.
The British imperial regime used the colonial army and police to punish entire communities for the crimes of individuals from those communities. It is a practice the post-colonial Nigerian governments have continued, using the post-colonial police and army in the same way. In recent years, the respective destruction of Odi and Zaki Biam by units of the Nigerian Armed Forces have taken hold in the people's minds as key examples of this phenomenon.
Most infamously, the pogroms of 1966 and 1967 were inspired largely by the belief that every Igbo in Nigeria was guilty of the actions of a handful of Igbo army majors. And the main reason the rebel Biafran enclave held out and refused to surrender long after victory ceased to be a possibility (and continued refusing to surrender even as deaths from blockade-related starvation mounted), was the belief that the entire population of Hausas and Fulanis in Nigeria shared the intent of the mobs that carried out the pogroms.
For the record, it took us 10 years to go from the peace of the 1950s to the wars of the 1960s, and many bad decisions by everyone happened along the way ... but I don't want to get off this point of our interminable problem with the ideology of collective responsibility, collective guilt and collective punishment. It is a phenomenon present in every incident of communal violence, with mobs that identify themselves as XYZ meting out punishment on anyone perceived to be ABC, because that person is by definition guilty of some perceived crime that all ABCs supposedly endorse merely by virtue of being ABCs.
What President Jonathan said was dangerous because he predicated his claim of MEND's innocence on a claim that "his people" the Niger-Deltans would not do this. In other words, Jonathan believes MEND's actions are an extension of "his people's" decision-making. If "his people" wouldn't do it, then MEND wouldn't do it .... which is an inversion of the same problematic argument made by the Obasanjo administration to defend its decision to destroy Odi as retaliation for the killing of 12 policemen.
President Jonathan has also cast doubt on the outcome of the investigation. If the investigation announces that anyone other than MEND committed the crime, Nigerians would be well within their rights to wonder if the finding was influenced by the president and not by the facts, even if MEND were innocent.
Postscript: The security agencies have improbably lined up two suspects, and have even more improbably cited vague "foreign-based entities" as the source of the funding for the attack. Rumours are flying that these "suspects" have implicated members of the Ibrahim Babangida presidential campaign. Who thinks it is just a coincidence that this will allow the government to dismantle the campaign of a man Goodluck Jonathan perceives to be his biggest rival for next year's to-be-rigged presidential poll? Maybe someone from Niger State to declare that Babangida is innocent because "he knows his people and knows his people will not be involved in this".
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