Radar weekly said in its latest issue that the incumbent government’s favorite game is to scatter personnel like pebbles across ministries without any logical, let alone professional justification. The message to the voters is unequivocal – we reward those who steal for us and allocate to them ministries where they can fully showcase their “talent.” And we also mock you.

Given that expertise and competence in a particular field play absolutely no role in the allocation of ministerial seats, what message does Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic want to convey to the electorate through certain appointments?

For example, the choice of Jelena Zaric Kovacevic for Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government sends a clear message – precisely the person who has stood out in the field of electoral engineering has been appointed to head this ministry. The weekly said she was “nominated,” back in February, by People’s Movement of Serbia MP Djordje Stankovic, when he said that she was the one “managing” voter migration ahead of the local elections in Nis, along with the then Internal Affairs Minister Bratislav Gasic. This was more than enough for him to also recommend Gasic for a new position – minister of defense.

Since he is so good at exerting pressure, why wouldn’t he do that but with more weapons than at the Ministry of the Interior, and, as a tile setter claiming to be an economist, he is equally qualified for the army and for the police.

Also amusing was the appointment of Milica Djurdjevic Stamenkovski as minister for family care and demography, said Radar, noting that she had solemnly promised to “run the department as a mother of children and a daughter of Serbia,” only to be sent on her first assignment to a tacky Easter party at the home of the “boyfriend” of a Pink TV presenter. And all this without her family.

Darko Glisic has been appointed minister for public investment. Among other things, he should be in change of disaster relief efforts. Given that he is an engineer of geodesy (a science that, among other things, studies the movement of the Earth’s crust), maybe he ended up there to prevent the “natural disasters” caused by Vucic’s childish desire to build whatever he wants wherever he wants, such as Corridor 10, where the supporting wall collapsed so many times that the president eventually decided to demolish the entire hill, the weekly said.

There is absolutely no way of knowing how Nikola Selakovic will perform as minister of culture, seeing as he has very little to do with culture. Except for the fact that he was president of the Serbian cultural association Despot Stefan Lazarevic for a year, the only thing that can be found in his biography is that Svetlana “Ceca” Raznatovic sang at his wedding, and that, as the president’s secretary general, he visited Switzerland and opened the 21st Children’s Folklore Festival in Dietikon, said Radar.

Selakovic was probably recommended for this position by throwing in the trash a bottle of water he snatched from a female student during a lecture at the Law School because it had a Croatian label on it. Interestingly, despite such a ludicrous appointment, many cultural workers breathed a sigh of relief because they preferred a minister who goes from one ministry to another over the alternative that was long in play – historian Dejan Ristic, who became famous for branding genocide against the Serbians and denying the genocide in Srebrenica. It is clear what recommends Selakovic for a ministerial position in Vucevic’s government, but it’s quite difficult to find something that recommends him for the position of Minister of Information and Telecommunications, unless it’s the fact that he reads newspapers and has access to the Internet, said Radar.