Hisbah squads are recognized by law in several northern Nigerian states, among them Kano, Sokoto, and Zamfara, where state legislatures have adopted Sharia law and empowered such groups to police public conduct. Plateau State has never taken that step. It is a predominantly Christian state, and introducing Sharia there would require both the governor's approval and passage by the state assembly. Neither has happened.
"No individual or group has the authority to appoint itself the government of Plateau state," Mutfwang said in the directive, according to the government's statement. He ordered security agencies to identify and arrest those involved, investigate the sponsors and financiers behind the group's activities, and strengthen intelligence gathering across the state. Officials said this week that Plateau "would not permit any group to operate as a parallel security agency," and that anyone found imposing unauthorized rules, demanding money, or intimidating residents would face arrest and prosecution.
Plateau State sits in Nigeria's Middle Belt, a region that has endured years of deadly attacks on Christian farming communities. The governor's order comes as his administration works to reassure residents that the rule of law, not the rule of self-appointed enforcers, will govern the state.
When Men Set Themselves Up as Law
Now here is a thing worth turning over in your mind, my friend. A group of men in Jos decided among themselves that they had the right to police their neighbors — to walk into a man's business, tell him how to live, and charge him for the privilege of being left alone. No legislature gave them that power. No vote of the people put them in office. They simply took it, the way false authority always does, by force and by fear.
A governor said no. He said the law belongs to those lawfully given it, and no man may crown himself judge over his neighbor's conscience. That is a sound principle, and scripture has always known it. God ordains government to restrain evil and protect the innocent — not to bind men's souls, but to guard their bodies and their peace.
"Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." (Romans 13:1)
But there is a deeper trouble here than a badge with no legal standing behind it, and it touches every soul reading this, whatever nation you call home. Wherever men try to manufacture righteousness by threat and by rule-book, wherever religion becomes a system of extortion instead of a gift of grace, you are looking at the oldest counterfeit there is. The Pharisees ran that racket in Jesus' own day — laying burdens on men's backs they never lifted a finger to carry themselves. Christ did not come to hand you a longer list of rules enforced by a harder fist. He came to set the captive free.
"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." (Galatians 5:1)
You cannot legislate a man into holiness, and you cannot extort him into it either. Every self-styled enforcer who ever walked the earth, in Jos or anywhere else, has proved the same lesson: fear can make a man behave, but only the blood of Christ can make him clean. The law, rightly used, restrains the hand. Only the gospel changes the heart.
So take this news as more than a dispatch from West Africa. Ask yourself what yoke you have let some voice — political, religious, or merely the voice of your own fear — fasten around your neck. God is not looking for men who obey out of terror of the tax collector at the door. He is looking for sons and daughters who come to Him because His Son already paid what justice required. That is not a burden. That is liberty, bought at Calvary, offered free to whoever will have it.