For bad leaders, 'dignity' is never having to admit you are a sell-out

On Sunday, as Robert Mugabe wished the world a good night, nobody was sure what they'd just seen. Was this the Rubicon, or had rubes just been conned?

Soon, however, slow-motion replays were revealing the truth: a small sheaf of papers - presumably the bit of the speech that included Mugabe's resignation - being passed between generals the way teenagers try to offload a joint when their mom knocks on the door. You take it! No, you! It was your idea! No, it wasn't! Nothing, mom, we're just, er, studying!

The problem was the chairs. Had Zimbabwe fallen for the hyper-kitsch, Kardashian-kak aesthetic that has seduced the ANC, everybody would have been sitting in huge, white, high-backed pleather armchairs. It would have been easy to stuff the speech down a crack.

Mugabe, however, is Anglophile to his core and had packed the place with austere, thin-legged chairs straight out of Downton Abbey (or, as he calls it, "my favourite documentary"). There was nowhere to hide the purged pages. And so they were dumped on the floor like ballot papers from an election deemed free and fair by Thabo Mbeki.

It must have been excruciating for the officers, and not a little bit scary: nobody wants to be the guy holding the detonator when your cunning plan to blow up the monster has gone pfft and it's slowly pushing its glasses up its nose and turning to look at you.

But soldiers are trained to sacrifice themselves, and so the generals threw themselves on that papery hand grenade. They had to. Because what was at stake was far more important than their small lives. What was at stake was Robert Mugabe's "dignity".

A certain kind of leader is very big on "dignity", especially after he's crashed the economy of his country or sold it to foreign oligarchs. I say "he" because it's always a man. And I'm using quotation marks around "dignity" because it doesn't really have anything to do with dignity as you and I understand it.

No, what bad leaders and their lickspittles mean when they demand "dignity" is not to be treated with respect but rather for reality to be suspended. What "dignity" means is defeat without defeat, consequences without consequences and, in Mugabe's case, retirement without retirement.

Above all, they want the right to spend their lives preying on the poor or selling their countries to the highest bidder without ever being called the predators or the sell-outs that they are.

A few South Africans are calling for Mugabe to be treated with dignity. The EFF, on the other hand, want "dignity". At the weekend the party called for Mugabe to be given asylum in South Africa, presumably as a reward for his anticolonialist history, or else just to allow Julius Malema to go round and get back his box of mix-tapes.

The EFF's position upset a fair number of people but I would urge them to remain calm. Given the party's position on Mugabe, we can expect an announcement on Wednesday explaining why Mugabe is not welcome in South Africa, before Thursday's demand that he be given asylum at once, followed by Friday's press statement, rejecting the idea with contempt.

If the EFF is militating for "dignity" for Mugabe, however, the ANC is praying for it.

The pictures coming out of Harare of Zanu-PF cronies singing and dancing would have been unsettling to the Zupta cabal, a graphic reminder that even the most loyal henchgoons will abandon you in an Nkandla second the moment you're in real trouble.

Fortunately, however, our president can rest easy. He may not have a shred of dignity but he will get plenty of "dignity" when his turn comes. It's what we do and what we've always done. The apartheid prime ministers and presidents walked away with their fortunes and their "dignity" intact. So, too, will the current lot.

Still, spare a thought for the unknown SA National Defence Force officers going about their day, unaware that one day, late at night, they may be thrust a piece of paper and told to sit on it until the nice man has stopped talking, the Rubicon has been crossed, and the rubes have been conned all over again.