Sahel Meter Dispute Shadows the Coming Water Session

NAIROBI — A dispute over water meters straddling a Sahel river basin has hardened into the most contested item delegates will carry into next week's Concordat session, pitting upstream and downstream governments over who reads, and who trusts, the numbers. The gauges measure flows across a boundary that four states share, and each accuses the others of adjusting the take during a third consecutive drought summer. Passage Trust, which manages migration corridors threading the same basin, warned that the quarrel has consequences beyond the ledger: registered climate migrants have climbed past 108 million, and the corridors through the Sahel carry a growing share of them. "When the meters become a weapon, the people walking past them pay first," said a Passage Trust field coordinator in Niamey. The Global Concordat Council has placed the meter question on the session agenda that opens Tuesday. No delegation expects it resolved in a week; all of them expect it raised.