REMEMBER the great ‘water car’ mania from the early 2010s? When some fellow managed to convince a large number of senior politicians and TV anchors that he had invented a car that used water as fuel? Remember how far and wide that mania spread, and how the father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme himself took to the airwaves to announce that this was some sort of game-changing new invention that held the solution to all our problems?

Remember the ‘$200 billion in Swiss bank accounts’ mania from the mid-2010s? That’s when some senior public figures, including Asad Umar, who would go on to serve as Pakistan’s finance minister a few years later, proclaimed it from the stage of a dharna. When I wrote an article debunking the figure, I was accused of siding with the billionaires. Years later, after he became finance minister, Umar appeared on the TV show of one of those anchors who had accused me of “siding with the elites” to say that the $200bn figure “is without foundation”.

Then there was the offshore oil canard that then prime minister Imran Khan announced minutes after meeting the team of an oil company undertaking drilling, even though he had been told there were no definitive findings to announce yet. In 2014, Nawaz Sharif showed up in Bahawalpur to announce that reserves of gold had been found there that were sufficient to pay our way out of all difficulties. There was the

© Dawn