So we just heard that the Earth experienced the hottest April in 137 years of record keeping, and it was the 12th consecutive month to set a new record.

May 2015 was the hottest May in records dating back to 1880. That was followed by the hottest June, and so on. A succession of 12 such hot months is unprecedented.  

The clever scientists who measure and know these things, said 2016 will be the third consecutive year to set a new global heat record—the first time that’s ever happened.

And if it isn’t the extreme heat, it is the floods. You get the drift.

A country like Niger could be all but wiped out in the coming five decades. Already, three quarters of it has become desert, and it is ravaged either by extreme heat and drought, or killer floods.

In the Sahel and parts of West Africa, the desperate journeys across the Mediterranean in rickety boats, are in part a flight of environmental refugees.

Reforestation and desert reclamation will do more to reduce those dangerous crossings, than European navy ships.

But is a long-term solution to reverse the march of climate change possible in Africa? It is, but the focus on climate funding and other resources, misses the point. Climate change is a political problem in East Africa, as in the rest of Africa.

Communities, private companies, and individuals can do a lot, for example, to build solar power stations and small dams, then sell the energy to rural communities to reduce the amount of forest people cut for wood fuel.

It is possible, with creative policy, to open up the water sector to affordable commercial exploitation as Ivory Coast’s President Alassane Ouattara is trying to do (in his case both water and electricity).

But, apart from civil society groups and NGOs that oppose such “privatisation” for ideological reasons and, with some justification, that it can lead to further exploitation of the poor, there are others who don’t want this – politicians, because it takes power away from them.

The day, say, 65 per cent of power and 55 per cent of water in any African country is provided by the private and independent sector, politics and power as we know them in Africa today will all but collapse.

For if you can’t promise people electricity and water every election cycle, and ask them to repay you with their vote in the event that you supplied those services, what other big modern things are left?

The provision of power, and in many cases electricity subsidies to industries, is one of the principal ways regimes keep businesses beholden to them.

A businessman who doesn’t get the electricity and water for his business from the state-run or parastatal utility company, really has no reason to return the minister’s call.

The other messy and extremely inconvenient bit is that many of the more democratic countries will fare worse than the enlightened dictatorships.

Allowing local supporters to cut down forest, and grab wetlands, is a popular way of winning votes.

A dictator who is feared, and can shoot illegal loggers, and wetland grabbers without electoral backlash, is likely to do more for the environment than a democrat who can’t bring himself to rig elections. Usually, I would suppress these kinds of views that can be misused by despots.

But the state of our environment has become too perilous for intellectual censorship.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3