TheInsider

Other kind of MP fights crime by confusing it

WHERE can one find the nodal point of crime or anti-crime?

MPs may try to answer this once they can tell left from right — MPs here meaning the military police and not Members of Parliament.

Earlier this month, the Department of Defence’s military police division hosted a conference to discuss crime and discipline in the department.

This anticriminality conference, as the department termed the event, sought to establish a “standardised approach … for the management of the prevention of crime”, the department, with the not-too-clever acronym of DOD, says on its website.

In an opening speech, certain strategies were proposed, including the following mouthful: “Supporting the nodal point on anti-criminality with the establishment of an integrated anti-criminality information database for accurate statistics and decision-making in support of anti-criminality management in the DOD, which will be available to all relevant role-players.”

Even the MPs in the National Assembly could not have outdone the MPs in the barracks with a sentence like this. Crooks in the army are not quaking in their boots. Office hours for quakes THE North West provincial government — bless its generosity — has activated a toll-free number for people who were affected by a recent earth tremor — and it has also opened a special bank account for donations for victims.

A report on the government website says Premier Supra Mahumapelo urged quake-affected residents to call the toll-free number on weekdays but not public holidays.

The provincial government believes the toll-free number will “strengthen co-ordination of information” related to the aftermath of the tremor.

All of this sounds like real Good Samaritan stuff, except that Good Samaritanism can’t in this case be done on weekends and public holidays.

If only earthquakes were so kind as to work an 8am-4pm day five times a week.

Not everyone is convinced of the government’s good intentions, which reminds one of a piece of Libyan graffiti during its civil war in 2011: “You can folly some of the people some of the time, but you can’t folly all the people all of the time.” The Insider hopes these disaster-relief funds really reach the victims, or it will have been a folly to fool people in this way. Wise words “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” William Blake, English painter, poet and printmaker (1757-1827).