I read with great interest on a comment by DCP Mohd Sabtu Osman in local English daily stating that the roadblocks on Monday did not affect the economy. This simple statement has irked me the most and has spurred me to rebut. Let me do it point by point and I will stick to just two points.

Foreign investors: During the Hindraf rally, the police contingent behaved in the same way by creating roadblocks. This created massive jams. A foreign investor that I know was traveling from Bangi to Kuala Lumpur on Monday for a business meeting.

He had to cancel the meeting due to the unexpected jams which resulted in him being delayed in reaching the venue in KL. This delay and cancellation resulted in him missing out on a business opportunity.

I am not going to state the ringgit value here. It took him more than two hours just turn back home.

He had told me then that he found this whole ‘political play’ absurd. He further claimed that democracy and peaceful protests go hand-in-hand and that it is common to have such protests in the UK and the US.

These protests do not affect the day-to-day life and business goes on as usual. The government of the day does not intimidate the general public.

Having said this, I know he had cancelled two projects that he had in the pipeline and I believe he now considers Vietnam and Singapore for the projects. The reason of his cancellation is simply due to the decision by the police and not any demonstration or rally.

Wasted man-hours: In most industries, cost is calculated in man-hours. For the IT industry, one man-hour can go as high as RM1,000 per man day of eight hours. I was stuck in the Monday jam for one hour and forty minutes.

If you multiply that by the thousands who were stranded, the numbers would be mind-boggling.

If both the above are not a simple example of economic loss, I wonder what is. Perhaps it is high time we sent all senior police officers for some classes on economiy and economic activity. Please note, I have not touched on the share market, investor confidence, etc.

Had the police better planned their work, this whole scenario could have been averted. The 1,600 police personnel could have been put to better use, especially in curbing all the robbery, theft and burglary that is happening throughout the country.

For heavens sake, 20% of them can easily reduce the snatch theft and pick-pocket incidents in KL.

This whole story about a planned rally by Anwar Ibrahim does not make sense. Most of the city dwellers are tech-savvy and none of us had read in any of the opposition party websites or the ‘popular’ websites about a call for rally/demonstration on Monday.

If police based their information on an obscure website, then they badly need to beef up and improve their IT intelligence gathering unit.

The ill-conceived roadblocks has made even the fence sitters to seriously consider voting for opposition parties now. They seem to have better rationalism mechanism compared to most of the federal agencies.

If the ruling government wants to win the lost votes, they better look into enhancing their public relations skills and ensure that federal agencies such as police and the AG’s chambers do not make a fool of themselves anymore.