I am writing this to draw attention to all Malaysians, the majority of whom are honest taxpayers who wake up every morning and jostle for seats on buses and trains to put in their honest day's work.

Do you know that aside from Malaysia as one of the countries with one of the highest number of number of pubic holidays (now Sept 16 being Malaysia Day, a new one), we are perhaps one of the countries with the most number of man hours lost due to excessive politicking.

Since the last general election (our general elections now cost billions), every political party has been plagued with all kinds of problems including those of leadership, constitutional, inter-party or even murder (of a Johor MIC leader).

It is quite normal, you might say, that is the way it is because we are practising the Western-sytle, a la Westminster-style rather, democracy.

Quite true, I would say, but the way we do it has nothing to do with the Westminster system.

We are practising the system similar to China's party system whereby the leaders of the head of the ruling party and the coalition are also leaders of the government.

Thus party matters and party problems and power struggles will take a lot of their attention and time leaving very little time for them to attend to matters and problems of their departmental portfolios.

Take the transport and health portfolios headed by the MCA president and deputy president respectively and the MIC minister for human resources. Umno leaders, too, are bogged down with trying to win seats in by-elections and amendments to the party's constitution.

PAS, PKR and DAP, too, are constantly plagued with leadership problems, leaving very little time for them to offer alternative policies, check the administration of the incumbent government and formulate better policies for the rakyat.

The icing on the cake is the 'hung' government in Perak.

If we can look at the records of the telephone calls and conversations of these party leaders, I wonder what is the ratio of party-related calls to work-related calls. And I wonder who paid for these personal and party phone calls and conversations.

Under the British and American systems, the parties are just vehicles to gain government leadership ie the offices of the president of the US and the British prime minister.

The US president (be him or her Republican or Democrat) and the British prime minister (be him or her Conservative or Laour or Liberal Democrat), are not leaders of their parties.

The parties are headed by the chairpersons who merely run the party's day-to-day administration and handle minor problems which do need the attention of the president or the prime minister.

This is also true in all the democracies of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or even Japan and South Korea.

My question is, how long can we go on with this stupid situation particularly in light lower foreign direct investment, a higher corruption perception, an alarming auditor-general's report each year, escalating crimes etc.

We can never increase productivity and maximise utilisation of man-hours if we go on like this thinking that everything is all right. It is not all right.