Did you see those live reports from the port city of Beira on BBC TV as Cyclone Idai swept into Mozambique?
No? That’s because the BBC appears to have had no-one in place as this destructive cyclone approached, despite knowing what was coming.
On Tuesday, 12th of March the Red Cross issued this warning. “This dangerous and powerful cyclone could pose an extreme risk to tens of thousands of people in Mozambique.”
The BBC itself covered the approaching storm as it hit on Friday 15th.
The BBC knew this disaster was coming but did it fly its crews into Mozambique?
I can find no evidence that it did.
Yet the cyclone was far more destructive than hurricane Michael that hit the USA last year.
Described by the BBC as having left “unimaginable destruction” its death toll was just 57.
Cyclone Idai may have killed more than 1,000 people in Mozambique, as President Filipe Nyusi said in an address on national radio on Monday 18th. Others will have died in Zimbabwe and Malawi.
The BBC plays catch up
By Monday the BBC finally managed to get a report for its TV News from Shingai Nyoka. 
Nothing wrong with her report – but it was from neighbouring Zimbabwe, not from Mozambique.
It was a pre-recorded story that was shown at 23 minutes past the hour on the BBC’s flagship nightly bulletin – the News at Ten – on Monday 18th.
How different from the live coverage from New Zealand’s Christchurch with a whole team, including presenter Clive Myrie.
This was on the same News at Ten – but much earlier: at 8.30 minutes into the bulletin.
The coverage was starkly different.
BBC TV treated the 50 deaths in New Zealand as a major news event. The devastation of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, with perhaps 1,000 deaths, was clearly treated very differently.
Online coverage of the disaster
Compare the treatment by these news outlets of Cyclone Idai. All are taken from their front pages at 23.00 on Monday 18 March 2019.
Perhaps the most scandalous is the coverage by the South African Broadcasting Corporation – the SABC – of the plight of its neighbours.
BBC 
Channel 4
Al Jazeera
CNN
South African Broadcasting Corporation
France 24
The Times
Voice of America
This critique is of BBC domestic coverage.
BBC World Service (for which I worked) would have been very different and I am sure the BBC African Service covered the story extensively.
But the BBC has a responsibility to its British audience which it cannot duck.
Couldn’t agree more. Even the Africa threads (I was in Somaliland and then Nairobi) were disjointed and seem to have no fundamental understanding that it was one region across three countries. No meaningful maps, for instance, on TV. World service radio gave no feeling of enormity just endlessly quoting a wfp man who said it might be the worst disaster in the southern hemisphere.
The endless repetition of Pres. Nyusi’s guess from a helicopter on the first day that maybe a 1000 died in Beira morphed fied into a ‘fact’ and was never updated (CNN which is giving quite a lot of coverage is also doing it in a bitty way). The 1000 became iconic though it had no factual basis at all (you even quote it yourself).
Oddly no one has ever mentioned the 2000 floods which were quire similar though on a different river . Plucking form trees etc … exacerbated by Zim opening a dam without warning to Moz and doubling the effect of the floods.
Interesting confusion of floods from a river and floods from rain. In 1988 Khartoum flooded because of unusual heavy rain (no real drainage, bodies floated out of shallow graves) but it was widely attributed to a rise in the Blue Nile after rains in Ethiopia. Two totally different phenomena. The Blue Nile just flooded the riverine areas (riparian as we are learning to call them in Nairobi) and that happened every year, and was welcomed by the shoreline intensive farmers.. {Makes you think of Western weather forecasters who cheerily tell Khartoum it will be a sunny day, and commiserate with other places because a lot of rain will fall. .
When central Hargeisa was damaged by a river flood in 2005 (?) it was not raining at all in Somaliland – the whole flood bore down from Ethiopia with no warning at all.
Back to 2000, around Xai xai : We all agreed that teachers and HMs had done well – when they had time – by getting the students and pupils to carry everything from their schools up a hill or tall building, saving the schools from huge losses (the banks locked everything up and the staff fled, coming back to sodden and churned up files and bundles of currency still securely locked in). Like after the volcano in Goma, I told the inevitable follow up conferences that we should take account of individual initiative in planning for crisis. I was generally ignored. Moz govt and UN going as far as saying that the teachers were in effect wrong to have saved things on their own initiative and in future they had to wait for the Disaster Management Agency to tell them what to do. Heard the same in Ghana: we will wait to be told what to do.
—
I used to train government staff across Africa in responses for education in emergencies. In Benin I tarted off as usual asking for any recent emergency (displacement, war, epidemic that sort of thing). Nope. The only thing that happens is that eight schools just SW of Cotonou flood every year, and always have done. A fact of life and no real interest in doing anything about it.