Below the Rights Floor: The Households the Meter Already Priced Out

MOMBASA OUTSKIRTS — The Rights-Floor Bill is being written for households like the Achiengs', and it is already too late for them. When the desal corridor reached this district two summers ago, the taps ran — for those who could pay the metered rate. The Achiengs could, for a while. Then the father's work dried up, the meter kept counting, and the family slid below the line the bill now proposes to draw. They did not move to a camp; they simply use less, and less, and less — a jerrican from a neighbor, rainwater when the sky allows, a careful accounting of every liter that would appall the engineers who laid the pipe. "The water came to our street," said Grace Achieng, indicating the standpipe forty meters and one unpayable rate away. "It did not come to our house." A floor set now will help the households still above it. For those the meter has already priced out, the corridor is a thing that arrived, and then, in every way that counts, departed. The bill's authors know this. The bill cannot reach back.