The Sahel Corridor's First Month: Real Relief, and the Ledger No One Will Show

AGADEZ — For the first time in living memory, the standpipes on the eastern edge of this desert city ran through the noon hours without sputtering, and the women who had queued before dawn out of hard habit found themselves, briefly, with time to spare. The Sahel desalination corridor completed its first full month of delivery this week, pushing treated water inland along a spine of pumping stations that did not exist a year ago, and by every metric that a thirsty household measures — hours of pressure, disputes at the tap, children kept home to haul — the corridor is working. The relief is real. What is not clear is who, precisely, owns it. Concordat auditors dispatched to certify the corridor's accounts came back this week without a clean answer: the meters belong to one consortium, the pipe to another, the water rights to a tangle of national and private claims that no one has troubled to reconcile while the crisis ran hot. "The water arrives," said auditor Fenna de Groot, choosing her words. "The ledger behind it has not." A city drinks first and asks later. But the asking has begun.