Police Head Chef must quit: MDP

Ali Antenna, reporting from inside a rice pudding bowl, Kenereege, Male, Maldives

Following a particularly nasty incident with a very hot plate of spaghetti, now famous all over Maldives as “Anni’s Spaghetti Incident”, the Chairperson of the Maldivian Democratic Party, Mohamed Nasheed (Anni) has declared that there was no other choice but for the Police Head Chef to resign from his post immediately, Minivan News has reported. Anni made the announcement right after a team of doctors pronounced him ready to speak, for lack of a better word, properly, or as coherently as he ever could.

“Ith’s dhisgrashfuth!” said Anni, still nursing a scalded tongue, which surprisingly made him sound a bit more coherent than usual. “Thish ish thoo dhays in a thow thath I’ve burnth my thongue now. Shomething hash tho be dhone. The YEM-DHEE-PEE vansh again callsh on the Polish Head Chef to shtep down, shinche thish is all hish faulth!”

Anni has on several previous occasions called for the Police Head Chef’s resignation, ever since the first time that several Police officers had barged in uninvited to the MDP hosted rice pudding dinner and confiscated all the bowls of deliciously mouth-watering rice pudding. Since Anni had a sweet tooth, a whole mouthful of them in fact, for rice pudding, he was not about to let the incident go without a fight. Several eyewitnesses said afterwards that Anni had been seen clutching several bowls of hot rice pudding to his chest and curling into a bowl in a corner in a futile attempt to save at least one or two bowls from the raiding policemen. He had taken down four baton-wielding, tear-gas spraying policemen before finally yielding to superior numbers.

After the incident MDP had immediately, if not even faster, launched an enquiry, or as Zaki calls it: ‘a fact finding mission’, and discovered that the reason the Police had been reduced to raiding MDP rice pudding dinners was because the then newly appointed Head Chef at Maldives Police Services had not been a big hit with the cops at the Police Station. The food, or whatever it was that the new Head Chef concocted in his huge black cauldron and tried to pass off as food, had been reviewed by several policemen, usually doubled over in pain and on the way to the hospital, as ‘unfit for a rat to eat’ and ‘able to give Superman heartburn’. The former statement was confirmed by local pest extermination services who tried to woo the Police Chef into working for them after discovering that all the rats in local Police Stations were leaving the Stations like… well, rats leaving a Police Station. Despite several requests to DC and Warner Bros. by Bakhabaru reporters, Superman was not available confirm the latter statement.

“There is a limit to how much hot and spicy food people can endure, to how much their human dignity can be violated because of unscheduled toilet visits,” Anni told Minivan News reporters recently. “If the Police Head Chef resigns now, everything will be solved. I won’t have to eat this hot and spicy food because all the chefs at MDP and my house are afraid of cooking my favourite rice pudding. Many of them have told me that they are scared of cooking rice pudding anymore because they are never sure when a Star Force team will burst in through the skylight and steal it! The fact that I don't have any skylights in my house or office is irrelevant.”

Bakhabaru reporters, Ali Antenna and Ahmed Satellite, tracked down well-known humanitarian and Commissioner of Police Adam Zahir for a comment but found themselves instead, being quick-marched and leopard-crawling through a field for two hours before they could convince him that they were not new recruits. When they finally got to the interview and asked him how a well-known humanitarian like him was taking the allegations against him he responded by barking out a few loud commands in what Ali and Ahmed believed was Dhivehi but had to eventually resort to a passing Policeman to translate.

“I am no humanitarian,” Zahir said, according to the translator. “It is a misleading notion being spread by jealous MDP members. In fact, I eat vegetables also, and occasionally, when the impulse takes me, beef too. All this talk about eating humans is just rubbish! It tastes horrible for a start, despite claims to the contrary by several cannibal tribes.”

He also vehemently denied the claims made by Anni about the rice pudding, saying that his recruits were too tough for such a wimpy food such as rice pudding. “They aren’t a bunch of sissies like the MDP are. They wouldn’t touch a rice pudding bowl with the blunt end of an AK47!”

“Without a change in management, there will never be any good food in the Police mess hall and they will continue to go on rice pudding raids,” said MDP Member of Parliament for Thaa Atoll and lead negotiator Hassan Afeef, who had at one point tried in vain to broker a deal with Star Force’s Rice Pudding Raiders by offering MDP Secretary Fathmath Shiuna in exchange for some of the rice pudding bowls. Tempting though the offer was, the Raiders had apparently been too hungry for food that day and Shiuna was disappointed to find she had to remain at MDP offices.

In an interview with Miadhu Daily, Acting President of the MDP, Ibrahim Hussain Zaki, burst into tears before finally revealing through wrenching sobs that he had missed his breakfast because by the time he had arrived at the table that morning, Star Force members had already foodnapped the rice pudding which he was planning to break his fast with.

“It was terrible! They just took it. Not even a by your leave,” he wailed. Seconds later he switched personas and cried with shaking fists and narrowed eyes brimming with hate and tears (not ‘happy tears’, mind you): “No doubt, the rice pudding was stolen in a politically motivated move. There is no other explanation!”

President Gayoom was unavailable for comment. Having conquered the latest SAARC Awards ceremony with the most coveted “Best President Award” for an unprecedented seventh time (he is being hailed by the other leaders at SAARC as the “Titanic” of Presidents ) he was, at time of going to press, recuperating at a Spa in decidedly un-tropical, yet extremely expensive, setting.