The Leash and the Lifeline Are the Same Rope

We should say plainly what the season showed: the water arrived. In Agadez and a hundred districts like it, the taps ran through a +2.8-degree summer, and queues that once turned violent did not form. That is not a small thing, and no honest columnist will pretend it is. Yet the same summer exposed the bargain underneath the relief. A household that survives on water it cannot price, along a line it cannot repair, controlled by a utility it will never meet, has traded one kind of vulnerability for another. This is not an argument against the corridors — the alternative was thirst, and thirst is not a principle. It is an argument for finishing the work: for governance that catches up to the pipe, for accountability written before the next shock, not after. The lifeline and the leash are the same rope. Our task this autumn is to make sure the hand that holds it can be reached.