Cyclone 2025, Anura’s crisis of competence and accountability, Sajith-SJB’s straitjacket

“AS a country, we are facing the largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history” declared President Anura Kumara Dissanayake addressing the nation for the first time since the cyclone struck. (https://www.dailymirror.1k/breaking-news/Emergency-powers-will-not-be-misused-President-assures/108-326543).

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

From 12 November did they get any warning at all?

That's not only typically misleading hyperbole, factually that’s wrong, untrue, false, fake—but that’s Anura. In the tsunami of 26 December 2004, 35,000 people were killed. Thousands went missing. 1.7 million were displaced. Before the tsunami hit, there was no warning, unlike in the November 2025 cyclone.

‘The flash of lightning that revealed the reality’ was a famous phrase of Lenin’s. This weather symbolism should be extended to contemporary Sri Lanka. The cyclone of November 2025 swept away the pretensions to comparative superiority or even basic competence, of the Anura Dissanayake administration.

The twin cyclones which hit Indonesia-Thailand-Malaysia and Sri Lanka are clearly evidence of climate change, but neither the Sri Lankan President nor Prime Minister participated in COP 30, the 30th UN annual conference on climate, held in Brazil, hosted by one of the greatest progressive leaders in the world today, Luis ‘Lula’ Inacio da Silva. One would have thought AKD would have regarded him a hero and regarded the opportunity with eagerness, but obviously not. If Anura had been at COP30 he could have learned things and made connections which might have proved useful today.

The Anura administration already stands out among all post-independence administrations for utter incongruity between its election manifesto and its post-election practice, its incarnation as an Opposition on the cusp of power and a party established in power.

On top of that comes the cyclone and its management. The imminence of cyclonic weather was on the public record two weeks before the actual event, and yet the Government did not take the most basic steps that previous governments have done with far less lead time. Furthermore, its post-event response has been incompetent when compared with its predecessors.