I understand the need of our leader to meet up with the US president, but to spend RM77 million just to lobby for a meeting is such a waste of money.

What can the meeting achieve? Can we be assured of more investment from the US? (that actually depends more on our policies and growth than kissing Obama’s hands) or are we buying more weapons from the States?

If the answer is ‘no’, then I really do not know what the 45-minute long meeting can achieve, apart from being a PR exercise aiming at telling the people that only a selected few leaders get to meet up with Obama, and Najib Abdul Razak is one of them.

I doubt whether Hu Jin Dao of China spent any money to lobby for a meeting; most probably Obama himself is seeking a meeting with Hu.

I doubt too whether Singapore ’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew needed any lobby group to meet up with US presidents; more likely, the presidents themselves wanted to meet up with Lee to pick his brain and hear from Lee firsthand how he viewed global issues including Asian ones.

I doubt whether our PM needs to spend this kind of money if he has firmly established himself as a statesman of stature, like the Singapore minister mentor.

It is not easy to get RM76 million. How many schools or hospitals can we build with that? How many poor can we help? How many buses can we buy to relieve the traffic congestion?

I view this spending as utterly wasteful and too excessive, but this is not the first nor will it be the last time our government is wasting money on such things.

We should instead improve our economic standing and our competitiveness; if we are among the nations with the highest growth rates and I am sure instead of we seeking meetings with others, others will come knocking at our door.