Tim Flack: Much ado about pushups on the beach

Key topics:Muizenberg beach PT session with US Marines and metro cadetsLegal claims of SAPS Act breach lack clear statutory basisPolitical outrage and media reaction framed a routine exercise as scandal.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Tim Flack.On a Saturday morning in April, a group of Cape Town Metro Police cadets, not actual officers with appointment certificates, just cadets in training, ran on Muizenberg Beach. They did push-ups, burpees, and shuttle runs. Alongside them were a handful of US Marines attached to the American Consulate in Cape Town. The Marines ran them through a standard physical training routine. Nobody was issued a weapon. Nobody conducted a tactical exercise. Nobody signed a bilateral defence agreement. They did PT on the beach, and then presumably went home.Within 48 hours, this unremarkable fitness session had been elevated into a matter of national sovereignty, constitutional governance, and diplomatic protocol. A security expert was quoted in the press. PAGAD issued a statement of condemnation. The Good Party raised "serious legal governance and accountability concerns." Eyewitness News sent formal questions to DIRCO. The Ministry of Police confirmed they had not been informed, which was reported as though it were a scandal rather than confirmation of how trivial the event actually was.The Act That Says NothingEldred De Klerk, a Senior Associate at the Africa Centre for Security and Intelligence Praxis, told EWN that "under the South African Police Act, the city would need approval from the National Police Commissioner" for this kind of engagement. He went further, questioning whether clearance from the Intelligence Minister was required, and raising the spectre of "mission creep" in municipal policing.The South African Police Service Act 68 of 1995 is publicly available. Anyone can read it. The relevant provision for metro police is Section 64, which spans six subsections and barely fills a page. Section 64(3) states that the National Commissioner "shall determine the minimum standards of training that members of municipal and metropolitan police services shall undergo." Setting minimum training standards for what cadets must complete is a bureaucratic function. It has nothing to do with granting or withholding approval for an informal fitness session organised at the local level..Read more:.Hawks swoop on City Power in R500m scandal: Raid or routine? Corruption probe intensifies.De Klerk cited no specific section of the Act. He pointed to no clause, no subsection, no schedule. The reason for this omission is straightforward: the provision he described does not exist. There is nothing in the SAPS Act that requires National Commissioner approval for a metro police unit to engage informally with foreign personnel on South African soil. There is nothing requiring Intelligence Minister clearance for cadets to do burpees. The Act contains a single section on international activity, Section 13(12), and it concerns sending SAPS members abroad with Ministerial approval. It runs in the opposite direction entirely.The phrase "under the Act" was deployed as though it settled the matter. It did the opposite. It invited scrutiny of legislation that, once read, undermines the very argument it was recruited to support.The DIRCO Question That Answers ItselfThe Marines are based at the US Consulate in Cape Town. The reporting describes them only as "US Marines" and JP Smith confirmed they are "based in Cape Town, at their Consulate." While Marine Security Guard detachments typically staff US diplomatic facilities, and the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group operates across the Africa region, none of the reporting specifically identifies these individuals as MSGs or clarifies their exact role. What can be said with certainty is that their presence in the country exists with the full knowledge and consent of the South African government. US Marines at embassies and consulates around the world routinely engage in community outreach, fitness sessions with local institutions, charity events and school visits. It is standard soft diplomacy and it happens in dozens of countries without generating headlines.EWN sent questions to DIRCO asking whether the training "aligns with South African foreign policy positions and diplomatic protocols." The question carries an implication that it might not. But the diplomatic framework that permits consulate staff to participate in informal community engagement is the same framework that allowed them into the country in the first place. The question answers itself for anyone willing to think about it for thirty seconds.The Coalition of the OutragedThe Good Party's Councillor Jonathan Cupido declared that the City "does not have the authority to improvise training arrangements outside of that framework," referring to the SAPS Act. He did not explain which section of the framework was breached, because, again, none was. His statement was a political press release dressed in legal language, aimed squarely at the DA-run City of Cape Town during a period of friction, when Good speaks lately it’s only ever to complain about the DA or JP Smith. The tell was his closing line: "Residents are not asking for beach drills and PR moments." The constitutional concern evaporated into a complaint about public relations. It is quite amusing; one might argue that a councillor issuing press releases about push-ups should be cautious about lecturing others on PR moments.PAGAD's involvement deserves particular attention. PAGAD, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, has been on the United States Terrorist Exclusion List since 2001, designated under Section 411 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Between 1996 and 2000, the organisation conducted 189 bomb attacks in the Western Cape. Their objection to US Marines conducting a fitness session in Cape Town carries a flavour of irony that should not require elaboration.Warships in the Harbour, Silence on the ShoreIn January 2026, three months before cadets did push-ups at Muizenberg, the South African Navy hosted Exercise Will for Peace at Simon's Town. Iranian corvettes, Chinese destroyers, and Russian vessels sailed into False Bay for a formal multinational naval exercise. The SANDF reportedly defied presidential orders regarding Iran's participation. Iranian warships steamed in South African waters, the same vessels now sitting in Davey Jones's locker, while the diplomatic and legal questions surrounding that exercise dwarfed anything that could conceivably arise from a beach run. The loudest voices objecting to American Marines on a Cape Town beach have been notably sympathetic to Tehran for years. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fury over Muizenberg has less to do with the SAPS Act and rather more to do with which flag was on the uniforms.The silence from the same quarters now raising alarm over Muizenberg was, at the time, conspicuous. PAGAD issued no statement condemning Iranian military vessels in Cape Town's harbour, for obvious reasons. The Good Party's constitutional outrage was nowhere to be found, it was just an opportunity from a political stokvel to stick one to the DA. De Klerk, not that one dear heart, did not, to public knowledge, question whether the SAPS Act required National Commissioner approval for the Navy to host sanctioned foreign warships.The selectivity tells you everything about the sincerity of the concern.What Actually HappenedJP Smith, the City's Safety and Security MMC, explained that the session was informal, cost-free, and arranged through existing relationships with consulate personnel. The City has been placing greater emphasis on the physical fitness of its enforcement services. The Marines offered to put cadets through their standard routine. The cadets accepted. They trained on a public beach, a few hundred meters from their training base, in full view of anyone who cared to watch.That is the entirety of what occurred. Everything else, the invocations of legislation, the demands for ministerial clearance, the insinuations about sovereignty, the formal questions to DIRCO, amounts to a political apparatus constructed around a non-event. The Act says nothing relevant. The diplomatic framework already permits it. The people raising the alarm either cannot point to a specific law that was broken, or have chosen not to, which amounts to the same thing..Read more:.How SAPS killed its detective service - and let crime run wild: Fanie Bouwer.Cape Town's metro police cadets did PT on a beach. The republic will survive. The bay of pigs is not upon us and MAGA is not going to start flying in IDF soldiers in sky pixel, deleting flying Vs for lessons in beeper assembly. You can breathe easily.

Tim Flack: Much ado about pushups on the beach

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