I bumped into Dominic Ntsele the other day. He told me that I am “in a camp”. Ntsele is a clever and charming man who works as a lobbyist and, I presume, some other things, for mining magnate Brett Kebble. Most recently, Ntsele was dispatched by his boss to Durban to be of assistance to the Shaik family during the recent trial of Schabir Shaik. Kebble has a hatred of anything that might once have passed through former prosecutions boss Bulelani Ngcuka’s hands. He believes Ngcuka prosecuted people for political ends.

Anyway, apparently anyone involved in political life in SA, even on the extreme margins like me, is in a camp. That, at least, is the logic of what Ntsele was saying and I know that it reflects the thinking in a rather large “camp” that includes Kebble, Jacob Zuma and the ANC Youth League.

I suppose being in a camp means you pick your side and stick with it, but it is worth asking questions of the “campist” tendency, as represented by Ntsele.

Campism implies that the only thing that matters is power. One camp will have it. One will want it. There is no ideology, or perhaps even thought, in a camp. There aren’t many moral considerations, either. It is a very rounded view of the world, and amazingly adaptable. Even after fraud is proved in a court of law, campists are able to ignore it. One camp has simply beaten another one. Nothing more.

There isn’t any question that the Ntsele/Kebble/Shaik/Zuma and who-knows-who-else camp wants power. But when I asked Ntsele what camp I was in, he wouldn’t say. It was, like, a secret.

The nearest any campist has come to describing the camp I am in was David Gleason who, soon after his Monday column in Business Day was terminated, told a website that “the essential issue about the termination of my column is that I have not followed Business Day editor Peter Bruce’s line. He has consistently campaigned for former deputy president Jacob Zuma’s dismissal because he sympathises with a faction within the ANC which aspires to the highest offices.”

But if he is in the camp above, which one am I in? Can you be in a camp without knowing it? Are journalists in camps? Let’s ask Ranjeni Munusamy, I suppose.

If you are in a camp, do you know other people in it? I presume I would be, in the eyes of the Ntsele/Gleason/Kebble/Zuma/Shaik camp (see how quickly these camps can grow) in the Ngcuka camp, along with the other people they say are in it — Saki Macozoma and Mzi Khumalo. Quite who their candidate might be for president I don’t know, but perhaps we journalists attached to camps operate on a need-to-know basis only. If I wanted to speak to these chaps I would have to look their numbers up in the telephone book.

Could I be in the Thabo Mbeki camp? It is apparently rather empty at the moment. His old friend, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, is cross about the way her ex has been treated. I don’t feel as if I am in that camp and, I hear, though do not know why, I couldn’t get an interview with Mbeki right now if I tried.

So would a campist please help me discover exactly which/whose camp I am in? Failure to do so will confirm what I suspect — that campism is merely a way of avoiding the obvious, of never having to make the simple choice between right and wrong (for instance, to praise Mbeki for sacking Zuma and to condemn him for supporting Robert Mugabe). Campists stick with their guy, no matter what. Campism is what impoverishes our politics, robs it of ideas and fills the gap with conspiracy, rumour and threat.

Because of that, make no mistake, campistas are good fun and, on the whole, much more amusing company than non-campists. But they are utterly mad.

With acknowledgements to Peter Bruce and the Business Day.