THERE is —always — wisdom in a prime minister’s allocation of ministerial portfolios. Those who are interested in it beyond a simple, habitual bashing of the federal government can actually find the positives behind the latest such allocation right away. A minister who had been ill-informing the people about our real ability to overcome the power crisis can only benefit from a top-level run at the Ministry of Information Technology that is all about communicating and communicating it rightly most of the time. Similarly, it is only conjecture that Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan will be unhappy about her shift from the information ministry to yet another brilliant innovation — the Federal Ministry for National Regulation and Services. If one thinks this is an unnecessary ministry one would have to first justify the existence of the very visible Ministry of Information. In any case, it is all about how politicians manage to stay in the news instead of what ministry they are given charge of at a given time — so long as the politician in question is a minister and has a flag to show for it. And since all of us seem to be in an imagining mood, who can stop the lady from Sialkot from asserting that news factories are in greater need of national regulation than, say, the sport-goods industry?

Next, take the portfolio for climate change. The very title seems to have bamboozled the biased critics of the Zardari-Gilani set-up. The new minister for the highly imaginative posting happens to belong to Faisalabad. Who would be better placed than him to report the effects of chimneys going silent because of a lack of energy? Since smoke is bad for the climate, he can only be expected to provide good news to the environmentalists. Who doesn’t want good news? The habitual government-bashers, of course.