Editorial
There comes a point in a nation’s decay when words like “failure” or “mismanagement” are no longer sufficient, because they imply that people tried and merely fell short. What we witness today is not failure. It is something darker, something rotted, something that smells of a people who have surrendered the last fibres of dignity. Cyclone Ditwah did not merely expose infrastructural weaknesses; it exposed who we have become—a nation that stands on its own ruins with its hands stretched outwards, waiting for someone else to supply its backbone.
The donations pouring in for the victims should have been an expression of solidarity. Instead, they have turned into a travelling circus of staged smiles, choreographed sympathy, and well-lit group photographs. What sort of society forgets the dying but remembers to pose? Foreign embassies, volunteers, influencers—everyone appears to know exactly where the camera is positioned, as if the true catastrophe is not the devastation but the risk of being left out of a photo caption. They hoist the boxes, align their shoulders, adjust their diplomatic grins, and publish the images before a single can of food leaves Colombo. The country is drowning, but the lenses remain polished.
And we, the people, consume these images without choking on our own shame. A nation that cannot feed 1.6 million displaced citizens without donations deserves to look itself in the mirror and feel a shiver of self-disgust. We pretend to be a proud civilisation, yet we wait for others to feed our hungry, clothe our shivering, and bury our dead. When did we make peace with such humiliation? When did dependency become normal enough to be photographed?
Our leaders mirror this moral collapse with such accuracy that one almost admires their honesty. They do not bother with gravity or responsibility; they prefer theatrical outrage, raised voices, and the cheap thrill of political point-scoring. The president, who now swaggers around Parliament like a neighbourhood tough, once sold himself as the nation’s truth-teller. Now he performs like a man intoxicated by his own noise, mocking opponents and issuing threats as if governance is a street quarrel and the country a pavement he claims ownership over.
It is astonishing that people still listen, though perhaps not surprising; after all, we have always confused loudness with conviction, and swagger with leadership. When he was in the opposition, he mastered the art of speaking in half-truths and clever distortions, calculating that a weary population would swallow anything wrapped in confidence. He was right. And now? Now the mask has slipped, and we stare at the emptiness behind it—but continue applauding as though hypnotised.
Cyclone Ditwah has torn away the national curtain. What stands exposed is not simply a government, but an entire political class that would rather rehearse narratives than confront disaster. Their only instinct is to make every tragedy an opportunity for performance. The country bleeds, and they count cameras. People wade through mud looking for missing relatives, and they draft statements crafted to sound profound without meaning a single syllable.
Yet the most degrading moment of all may be the Maldives donation saga. Here is a country our own bureaucracy labels as a “Security Concern”, a country whose citizens we subject to tedious visa harassment and cold suspicion. And yet, when the waters swallowed our villages, when we could not scrape together enough food for our displaced, who sent one of the largest consignments? Maldives. Twenty-five thousand cases of tuna. Fourteen containers. Food that will likely fill the stomachs of people who have never thought twice about insulting Maldivians. What a sight. We spend years muttering about security risks, and then open their boxes with the gratitude of beggars.
If Maldives is a threat, refuse their food. If Maldives is a friend, stop treating them like a nuisance. But this awkward middle ground—where we demean them by day yet eat their donations by night—reveals the truth about us. We have lost any coherent sense of who we are. Principles? None. Pride? A theatrical illusion. Consistency? Only in our ability to embarrass ourselves.
Every time a disaster strikes, we recite the same ritual. We gasp, we lament, we light candles, we share photographs of submerged rooftops, and we talk about learning lessons. Then we forget. And because we forget, the same stories repeat, only with more bodies. The people buried alive in the dark during Ditwah’s fury are added to a growing archive of deaths we will mention for a week and discard. Imagine their final moments—the sudden roar of earth collapsing, the weight compressing the air from their lungs, the terror of knowing they were alive under the soil and no help would come. And yet our leaders stroll through the aftermath as if they preside over an unfortunate inconvenience rather than a national disgrace.
Any leader with even a shred of humanity would have stood before the nation and uttered a simple word: sorry. But we have bred leaders who cannot pronounce the word without choking. Instead they remain cocooned in their arrogance, stepping over the wreckage with well-practised detachment, convinced that tragedy is a mere narrative obstacle to be spun and reshaped.
And what of the citizens? What of us? We who watch these scenes unfold as if they belong to another universe? We have developed an extraordinary talent for moral escapism. We blame politicians, but we vote for them. We mock corruption, but we accept it as routine. We complain about dependency, but secretly wait for foreign trucks, foreign ships, foreign containers to rescue us again. A nation does not collapse because politicians are corrupt; it collapses because people tolerate it.
We have become spectators to our own decline, clapping politely while the stage burns. There is no conspiracy, no foreign saboteur. The saboteur is internal: our complacency, our passivity, our strange willingness to be humiliated publicly and repeatedly. We want to feel proud without earning pride; we want to feel dignified without living dignity.
Cyclone Ditwah did not destroy our honour. It revealed that our honour had long since evaporated.
What remains now is a choice. We can continue down this path—posing for cameras while others feed us, pretending to be a functioning state while relying on charity—or we can finally stare at ourselves without flinching. The portrait is ugly, but it is ours. The shame is heavy, but shame is also the beginning of awakening. A nation that cannot feel ashamed is a nation already dead. A nation that can feel ashamed might still be salvageable.
At this moment we stand between those two possibilities. And if we choose the easier path—if we continue treating survival as a photo opportunity—then Cyclone Ditwah will not be remembered as a natural disaster, but as the mirror that showed us our true reflection: a country that abandoned its own soul long before the floodwaters arrived.
