At Least Two Sides to Every Issue

All of my course work is starting to blend together. I can't remember which conservations I had in which class, which professor said what.

I suppose it's my own fault for choosing classes that try to explain the same thing, just through different academic lenses. But the higher up I get in academia, the more I realize that it doesn't matter whether or not your trying to find answers through political science, ecology or anthropology, people will conclude different things, even while looking at the same facts.

We just read two pieces in my African cultures class, both put out around the same time, but with completely messages. The first was Robert Kaplan's, "The Coming Anarchy" and the other was Nelson Mandela's 1994 speech to the OAU. Both came out around the same time, Kaplan's in February and Mandela's in June, but each describes Africa in a completely different way. Kaplan's article, from the Atlantic Monthly, is famous for being the first wake-up call to the Western world about the trouble Africa is in. After I read it, I felt that Africa is beyond repair and there's nothing we really can do about it.

Mandela comes to a completely different conclusion. He tells the OAU that Africa has been through hard times, but they can persevere through them. He cites South Africa's expulsion of Apartheid as an example of all they can accomplish. Strangely, Mandela's hopeful speech comes after the Rwandan genocide and Kaplan's warning comes only a few months before it. Of course, Mandela is a politician and Kaplan is a journalist.

Another great example of people looking at the same thing but seeing it differently is the Jeffrey Sachs/ William Easterly debate. We're reading both their books ("End of Poverty" and "White Man's Burden", respectively) in Political Economies of Developing Countries, and it is hard to tell which has their facts right. It seems that both of them do, yet their conclusions are such polar opposites.

If you don't know the story behind Sachs and Easterly, Sachs runs the One Campaign with Bono and champions the idea that extreme poverty can be ended by 2025. Easterly makes no such claim and thinks poverty only can be ended by grassroots movements, instead of large aid donations recommended by One. Both make convincing arguments.

But when all the arguing is over, it seems like not much is really getting done. We get reports of terrorism around the world and people dying needlessly. The One Campaign reports 10 million children die every year, mostly from preventable diseases.

That is, until this year. UNICEF today released a report saying that in 2005 the number of child deaths before the age of five dropped to 9.7 million, a fall of 29% from 2000. This is the lowest its been since UNICEF began to record these statistics. "We feel we’re at a tipping point now,” said Dr. Peter Salama, Unicef’s chief medical officer. They expect this drop to continue, and think the UN Development Goal of cutting child mortality by two-thirds by 2025 could be accomplished.

So was Sachs right? Does this drop come from the increased efforts of NGOs like One and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria? Or was Easterly right, and this reduction in needless deaths is due to people at the bottom finally taking control of their lives?

Was Mandela right in calling Africa to unite and be strong? Or was Kaplan right in scaring the First World into doing something?

If more than 300,000 children are no longer dying needlessly, I don't think it matters.