Since the departure of the former Chief Justice Saqib Nisar, the Supreme Court has returned to being the stable, law-bound institution it is supposed to be. The justices have gone back to earnestly settling questions of law and bringing predictability back to a country still feeling the aftermath of Saqib Nisar’s gung-ho reign.

It was certainly a relief to see that the Supreme Court is not stirring controversy every other day, but the legacy of the former CJP will take some time to undo. Nothing encapsulates this more than his most precious project – the dam fund – which now hangs in limbo; unable to complete the purpose it was designed for, and abandoned by everyone as soon as the former CJP left his office.

This should come as no surprise, since everyone knew from the start that crowd-funding a mega-dam was simply impossible. Only Saqib Nisar’s court orders and verbal lashings and kept the whole project going. In his first major public appearance since his retirement at the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), the former CJP confirmed that he himself knew that the fund was a dead-end, and the whole thing was a charade to “raise awareness”.

While many will question the morality of wilfully misleading the nation, and many other will bemoan the millions wasted on advertising the damn fund, the only issue that should concern us at the moment is: what to do with the this fund?

The answer is not that difficult to find; experts have already suggested that the money collected in the damn fund cannot be used to build a large dam but can certainly be used to build many smaller projects that will boost water conservation equally. The current flash floods across the country only serve to bolster this proposal.

Now that the CJP has himself admitted the fund was never meant to succeed, it is time we repurpose it into something that is practically useful.