Plateau State governor, Simon Lalong has indicated his administration will enforce the laws regulating religious preaching to guard against hate speech and crsis.

“Here, we are keeping to the old law regulating religious activities in the state,” the governor said, weekend, when he met with newsmen at a parley organised to mark his one year in office. “Whether you like it or not, we must implement some of the rules.”

Lalong was responding to a question whether the state will introduce legislations to regulate religious preaching as done in the neighbouring Kaduna State, where Governor Nasir el’Rufai sent an executive bill for a law to regulate public preaching.

Lalong said Plateau will not initiate a bill for such a law, but added that there is already a law to regulate public preaching by religious organisations. He said the state will not hold back from enforcing the law.

“Because there was no regulation, we had this case of Boko Haram from the grassroots, no regulations. It metamorphosed into what we are going through now,” Lalong said.

He recaled  that in his time as speaker of the state legislature the House had responded to pressures from concerned persons, to initiate and pass a law in that regard.

He made references to the Kaduna preaching bill, and challenged newsmen to study it for the sake of understanding the action of his counterpart there. “Have you looked at the Law? It is still a reflection of the laws that we have…We have them in the law in Plateau State. It is to regulate.”

The governor said Plateau has no new bill to initiate, but insisted that it was expedient to consider an enforcement of the old law to stave off possible crises as the state had a nasty experience in 2001 over unregulated preaching.

“So that you don’t sit overnight in your house and tomorrow you announce that ‘yes, I saw a vision, now I am a preacher; I am going to form a church.’ With that kind of conduct, tomorrow you are forming a church and we don’t know where you are going to take people, and what you are saying there, we don’t know,” he said.

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Lalong: Plateau will re-enforce existing religious laws as opposed to adopt new ones