The Corridor Ledger Nobody Agreed To: Who Reads the Meter in the Sahel

AGADEZ — The water in the Sahel corridors is free at the tap and priced everywhere else. Every liter drawn from the relief skids is logged — by household token, by camp, by day — into a ledger the Tethys Hydrous Group maintains under contract to the Passage Trust, and that ledger, more than any minister, now decides how the next tanker is routed. No one at the standpipe voted for it. Few even know it exists. "They tell us the water is a right," said camp elder Moussa Ag Alher, holding the token that both admits him to the queue and records that he came. "But a right that is counted by someone I have never met, in a language I do not read — what kind of right is that?" Relief officials call the ledger the only fair way to move a scarce resource without riots; critics call it a quiet transfer of sovereignty from the thirsty to their accountants. Both are true. The corridor runs on the meter. The question of who owns the meter has never once been put to the people it measures.