I hope it is not a situation of a police to population ratio of 1:283 being equivalent - in terms of efficiency - to that of 1:3000 as claimed by the government that has not yet been retracted.

"There have been considerable lack of police professionalism, efficiency and effectiveness as well as the misdeployment of the police personnel and resources to protect the political regime instead of protecting Malaysians and the streets, public spaces and homes," Lim Kit Siang said echoing somewhat that which Kim Quek earlier said in his letter.

Kim Quek alluded to mega-projects, national service and the recent announcement to beef up the already overstaffed police force as a "sad malaise" of resorting to "minor and superficial" (but costly) "treatment of the symptoms rather than the real cure for the illnesses" of national underachievement, racial polarisation and the rising crime rate. Which raises the question of what is the real cure.

We have, for the time being and in our present state of denial, to resort to symptomatic relief because politically we cannot and dare not take the pill to even start the curative process. We are talking here the bottom-line root causes.

For efficiency to be restored in the internal management of the police force, the civil service and the educational system and for corruption to be slowly weeded out - for an end to polarisation and beginning to national integration - the political authority must be willing to take the first, if tentative, steps to organise the country and everything it does on the measurements and scores of merits and efficiency.

And to create a society in which advantage would go to the people who deserve it rather than to those who had been born into it, without which only a culture of inefficiency will be perpetuated whilst the efficient bring their talents elsewhere to solve someone else's problems without benefit to our nation.

The sad fact is that the country is still not ready to swallow this bitter pill of meritocracy even on the eve of the advent of WTO and Afta, and the proof of that is not just in the ruling coalition's denial of this problem but also the opposition front's repudiation of it as well.

Not only is reformasi parties keeping silent in their agenda on the issue of affirmative policies but they seek, in collaboration with PAS, to add a conservative religious dimension to national discourse by making Syariah supreme over the Federal Constitution without showing how this new dimension can actually address, as a panacea, our various national ills.

Until such time comes when we are prepared to grapple with that which actually counts, and harness human abilities available as a national resource instead of encouraging the easy way out in anything we do - until such time we can appreciate its corollary, the value of contrariety of viewpoints from democratic debate and freedom of speech and press.

It is understandable that, for the time being, we will have to carry on with this ubiquitous culture of hypocrisy to feel proud of our Twin Towers, national car project, MSC and other mega-projects, to pursue national service for national unity rather than defence, and to counteract the crime problem by recruiting another 23,000 police personnel over five years and increasing the maximum sentence for rape and incest in the Penal Code from 20 to 30 years.