Again hisbah police destroys 51 cartons of beer, other alcohol

By Ezurike Ugochukwu

Determined to crack down on drugs and alcohol in northern Nigerian cities with a Muslim majority that have reintroduced a strict version of Islamic law since the return of democracy to Nigeria in 1999, the Yobe State Hisbah Commission has seized and destroyed 51 cartons of alcohol and 18 jerrycans of methylene chloride, commonly known as Madarar Sukurdai, from different parts of the state.

This action followed also the state’s laws and Islamic values, which do not allow the sale or use of alcohol and other intoxicating substances.

The chairman of the commission, Yahuza Abubakar, disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday,.

Abubakar said Hisbah also helped settle 565 cases last year.

These, he said, included family problems, business disagreements, inheritance issues, fights between communities, unpaid rents, farmer-herder disputes, and other forms of debt.

“Most of these cases were resolved amicably through reconciliation and understanding,” he said

It will be recalled that in November 2013 hundreds of the Islamic police officers unloaded 3,873,163 bottles of alcohol in the village of Tudun Kalebawa of Kano State. They were seized from trucks coming from the Christian-majority south of the country, where Islamic law does not apply.

The crowd, including senior Hisbah and local government officials, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) as Bulldozers smashed the bottles to smithereens.

In 2022, Kano State Hisbah Board destroyed 25 trucks of beer and apprehended 2,260 suspected criminals in its operations from January to December.

in 2020, Kano State Hisbah Board destroyed 1,975,000 bottles of beer valued then at over N200 million.