Sri Lanka stands today not merely in the wake of another natural disaster, but amidst a damning indictment of State failure – one that has unfolded in real time, in panoramic view, with no room for excuses. The unprecedented floods and landslides that tore through cities, towns, and villages have left behind a trail of devastation that will cost billions to repair: shattered bridges, washed-out roads, crippled rail lines, collapsed riverbanks, broken dams, ruined irrigation channels, and thousands of homes and factories irreparably damaged. But the true catastrophe is not simply the violence of nature, but being repeatedly warned and the Government choosing to do nothing.
The country now finds itself struggling to stand after barely crawling out of the worst economic crisis in its post-independence history. Sri Lanka remains dependent on the IMF to keep the fiscal architecture from collapsing; still negotiating with creditors, still cutting costs to meet rigid performance criteria, still attempting to rebuild destroyed credibility. And now, on top of inflationary pressures, fiscal fragility, and social exhaustion, the State must suddenly mobilise billions to rebuild critical infrastructure, while pretending as though this disaster arrived from a clear blue sky, unannounced and unforeseeable.
No amount of relief money can wash away the truth that the Government failed to act before Cyclone Ditwah hit with ferocious force. It can announce grand relief packages, scatter compensation cheques across the wreckage, and hope the public mistakes generosity for competence. But facts are stubborn.
While the President’s massive relief package is as staggering as the damage estimates, the obvious question remains unanswered: where is this money coming from? If the Government is serious about rebuilding, credibility must be the first brick laid, and credibility requires accountability. Without that, every cheque handed out and every speech delivered will sound like what it is: an attempt to buy silence.
The contrast with Tamil Nadu is humiliating. The same storm killed over 600 people in Sri Lanka. Tamil Nadu, with a population three times larger, lost only three lives. The difference is preparedness – the reservoirs were emptied to cushion the impact, people were evacuated, and State machinery was shifted to top gear. Here, State employees were given a holiday when disaster struck.
The President himself admitted earlier this year that the country had identified more than 5,000 disaster-prone zones. Data was obviously available and evacuation should not have been a problem, yet it never happened. The Government’s defenders insist that no administration can fully control nature. That, of course, is true. But a responsible state prepares: it mitigates risks, builds capacity, and invests in science, data, and local government. The President stated as much during campaigning. And now the Government is asking the public for patience, as if patience were an infinite, freely available national resource. It is not. Citizens have grown weary of a political class that finds comfort only in tragedy, that discovers compassion only in front of cameras, that remembers its responsibilities only after the damage is done.
For all the talk of reform, resilience, and a new political culture, the truth is that Sri Lanka remains trapped in the same cycle of performative governance: boasting of intentions, avoiding accountability, and scrambling reactively from crisis to crisis. Even as floodwaters swallowed homes and livelihoods, ministers appeared on television reciting familiar platitudes like “the situation is under control,” “we are monitoring developments closely,” and “we will appoint a committee to investigate what went wrong”. After decades of hearing these lines, the public knows exactly what they mean: nothing will change.
Disaster management experts have been pleading for the strengthening of early warning systems, proper evacuation planning, and investment in resilient public infrastructure. These requests are not found in obscure academic journals, but, rather, submitted to ministries, written into reports, presented at conferences, and raised in parliamentary committees. Yet the machinery of the State continued to treat them as abstract hypotheticals – academic noise that could be ignored until the next catastrophe.
The economy will now absorb a new shock precisely when it can least afford one. The price tag for reconstruction will run into billions of rupees, forcing the Government either to divert funds from essential services or take on more debt, both of which undermine the very IMF targets it has been struggling to meet.
This disaster has also exposed, once again, the dangerous centralisation of authority that has crippled responsive governance in Sri Lanka. Local Government institutions, which should be the first line of defence in such emergencies, have been financially starved and politically neutered. Provincial councils remain ghost structures – constitutionally recognised yet functionally irrelevant.
Disaster management mechanisms, instead of being decentralised and community-rooted, are entangled in layers of bureaucratic red tape. When the floods came, decisions that should have been made within minutes had to be escalated up a chain of command that is slow, opaque, and deeply political. In a crisis, seconds matter. Yet the governance architecture is designed for delay.
The media too must shoulder responsibility. Year after year, as floods and landslides recur, coverage fades once the waters recede. There is a sustained focus on tragedy, but silence on the political decisions that make these tragedies inevitable. Reporters dutifully record ministers distributing dry rations but rarely interrogate why the same communities drown every year. Newsrooms spotlight rescue efforts but seldom examine the zoning violations, corrupt approvals, and infrastructural negligence that magnify disaster impacts. We have normalised a narrative in which natural disasters appear as acts of fate rather than outcomes shaped heavily by policy choices and political priorities.
At the core of this crisis lies a profound failure of imagination within the political establishment. Leaders continue to think in election cycles, not generational timelines. They view environmental protection, urban planning, and disaster preparation not as essential investments but as politically inconvenient expenses. They cling to the delusion that development equals more concrete, more buildings, more ribbon-cuttings; never mind that this very model of development has made cities more fragile, rivers more obstructed, and communities more vulnerable.
A responsible government would treat this disaster as a turning point, not an obstacle. The President must walk the talk on enforcing zoning regulations without political interference, strengthen early warning systems, expand scientific monitoring, and elevate disaster preparedness to the level of national security.
The Government must launch a transparent audit of all infrastructure – bridges, dams, culverts, and drainage networks – to identify critical vulnerabilities. It must empower Local Governments and give them the tools, funds, and autonomy to act swiftly when danger looms. It must legislate mandatory climate resilience standards for construction, public works, and urban expansion.
But there is little evidence that such change is forthcoming. The Government’s instinct, as usual, appears to be to manage the optics rather than the root causes. Already we hear murmurs about rescue missions for political mileage, committees formed to diffuse criticism, inquiries initiated only to be forgotten, and promises of ‘new policies’ that will remain dormant like the Disaster Management Act. Sri Lankans know this political theatre too well: the grand declarations, the symbolic visits, the carefully staged meetings, the rehearsed sympathy, the studied avoidance of responsibility.
What this country needs at this hour is not sympathy but honesty: not platitudes but accountability, not committees but action. For too long, Sri Lanka has tolerated a political class that takes credit during calm and hides during crisis. For too long, we have allowed leaders to deflect blame onto nature while refusing to acknowledge the systemic negligence that amplified the destruction. For too long, we have accepted the narrative that resilience is a cultural trait rather than a policy obligation.
This flood has revealed, with painful clarity, what happens when a nation entrusts its fate to leaders who fail to act until calamity is already at its doorstep. The price of that complacency is now being paid by the farmers who lost their crops, the families who lost their homes, the workers who lost their factories, and the nation that has lost yet another opportunity to break free from the cycle of disaster and denial.
If the Government genuinely seeks to rebuild trust, it must first confront the truth with humility: this tragedy was not merely an environmental event but also a failure of governance – made possible by ignored warnings, misplaced priorities, political hubris, and catastrophic complacency. Until that truth is acknowledged, and until systemic reforms are enacted with urgency and sincerity, Sri Lanka will continue to drown not only in water but in the consequences of its leaders’ neglect.