CRIMINALS' DELIGHT - BIG FAT COPS

Dear Minister of Police Nathi Mthethwa,

       Is anything really being done to get our South African cops into shape?

         Your previous deputy Fikile Mbalula, who by coincidence now happens to be our Minister of Sport, attacked our Police officers for not being fit enough to catch a bus let alone any criminals.

        He accused them of "ballooning" after leaving training colleges. He went further by saying "They can’t be busy massaging their beer bellies when criminals are on the run.

       "Are you fit enough to fight the criminals," he asked. "If not the police service is not for you. We need officers who can match criminals pound for pound."

        That pound for pound part was a bit ambiguous, but I think we all got the message.

        Fikile’s outburst about fat cops was more than a year ago. So you would have thought that some hard graft would have been introduced after that.

But if the latest South African Police Service magazine is anything to go by Fikile’s get fit ideas went the way of so many Police dockets. They got lost.

         The magazine tells us that at the Force’s (sorry is it Service or are we going back to the more feared Force again) 2011 Functional Fitness Championship there were only 350 competitors out of a total of 150 000 policemen in the country. And eight of these got certificates for having competed in the Champs for the last 10 years.

        Were these 350 the only ones fit enough to compete or were they the best from all our nine provinces?

         Whatever the answer it seems that the compiler of the article was so hard pressed to find photographs of athletic looking officers who had taken part that the anonymous, pot bellied gentleman shown above had to be included among the four illustrations

         I hope he didn’t do himself an injury struggling over the 12 obstacles that were designed to take into account the kind of things members might encounter when chasing crooks.

         Being a Police publication the magazine had to have a mystery.

I see he was wearing a 2010 T-shirt. Did this mean he wasn’t awarded one for 2011, or did the magazine, which is very amateurish, take his photograph from a file when he in fact didn’t even take part in the 2011 Champs?

We’ll have to get the CID to answer that one.

Either way his picture is a terrible advertisement for the state of our cops and for the Functional Fitness Championship which has been going for 13 years. And if it is representative of the entire Force then Fikile’s criticisms needs to be taken a lot more seriously.

Our diminutive Fikile was bound to come to grief throwing his weight around with the big boys. No wonder he got moved from Police to Sport because it was bad for moral to have him picking on pot bellies and big bums. You’ve got to have something to give the criminals a laugh.

But he took the Sport portfolio even more seriously than the Police one and gave everybody a laugh. The athletic Fikile’s high jinks with model Joyce Molamu were a perfect recipe for getting your cops into shape.

And think how popular this kind of gym work would be.

Joyce said she became pregnant on her first date with the married Minister. He admitted having sex with her and using a condom, but it broke. He must have been using one of those poor quality, Government issue ones.

He claimed he had been separated from his wife and it was only when they got together again that Joyce became bitter when this gallant, sportsman dumped her.

Aren’t our cops compelled to keep fit, Mr Minister? I see officers claim there are no exercise programmes and that many of them put on weight because they eat so much junk food bought from street hawkers while on duty.

What about hiring Joyce as a consultant? I’m sure you would have no problem getting most officers to keep fit classes if she was there.
Yours respectfully,

Jon, a concerned citizen who was turned down by the Force because his 100 m over obstacles was not  below 10.510 seconds.