He was a small man, but when he stood to speak, the African minister dominated the room. "I am the chief architect of the no-term-limit policy in my country," he proudly announced. "It has worked well for us. With time, I hope to see the same approach adopted in the rest of Africa." He must have heard the sound of teeth grating across the floor. He didn't give a damn.

The minister's cool defence of his president's right to run and run, voiced at an off-the-record conference hosted by the Brenthurst Foundation at the South African game reserve of Tswalu, has been ringing in my ears in the run-up to the G8 summit in St Petersburg.

One year on from Gleneagles, the press has flagellated western governments over their failure to deliver on pledges made during the euphoria of the Make History Poverty campaign. Newspapers have sorrowed over Bob Geldof's conclusion that rich countries have delivered in only one of the three target areas - debt relief - with progress on trade "completely off track" and slippage on aid. Almost forgotten in all the brouhaha has been the matter of reciprocity. African governments, too, made promises last year, namely "to deepen transparency and good governance; strengthen democratic institutions and processes [and] show zero tolerance for corruption", to quote the chairman's summary. And nothing could better highlight African leaders' disinclination to deliver on their side of the deal than the issue of presidential terms.

An African Union (AU) summit that ended in Gambia on 2 July brought the rejection of a "democracy charter" designed to halt the growing habit of incumbent presidents, adept at using state resources to render their challengers electorally invisible, to alter constitutions to allow them to keep standing for election. The 55-article charter committed signatories to a free press, condemned military coups as a means of power-changing, called for independence of electoral bodies, and warned governments against violating the spirit or letter of their constitutions. Those breaking it would face suspension from the AU.

It is easy to see why AU foreign ministers, gathering at a 52-villa hotel and conference complex built specially in Banjul for the occasion, threw the charter out. They knew there would be few takers when it was presented to their bosses for a vote. The host for the meeting, the Gambian president, Yahya Jammeh, originally took power in a coup; the AU's current chairman, the former militia leader Denis Sassou-Nguesso, seized control of Congo-Brazzaville after a civil war that left 10,000 dead in the ravaged capital. As for constitutions, Uganda, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Gabon (head of state: 39 years in office) have all rewritten theirs to allow sitting presidents to stand again. Presidential supporters in Nigeria, Malawi and Namibia have tried to pull off the same trick, but failed.

As the trend has gathered pace, I have found myself wondering how advocates justify the "no-term-limits" policy. So, when the minister raised the issue at Tswalu, I pricked up my ears. I was curious to see how he would dress it up for external consumption. "The crisis of Africa has been a crisis of leadership," he explained. So far, so good. A country that had lived through a history as traumatic as his nation's needed good leadership, he went on. Absolutely. There was a dearth of good leadership in Africa - yup, yup, I was still with him - so, obviously, the only way to keep the nation steady on its course was for the president to remain at the helm.

I fell back in my seat, marvelling at the sim plicity of the argument. It was an explanation so wilfully obtuse it took one's breath away. It ignored the blindingly obvious fact that democracy becomes self-perpetuating only when rooted in systems and institutions, not individuals. Here was a recipe for the endless repeat of Big Man syndrome, a rallying call for the cult of personality.

If the minister believed it himself, then he had never grasped what his country was signing up for in all the "good governance" talks staged with donors over the years. If he didn't, his chutzpah in presenting such an intellectually lazy justification showed how thoroughly his administration - which has 50 per cent of its costs met by the west - took its foreign support for granted.

And there's the rub. What the Make Poverty History campaigners rarely relay to their well-meaning supporters back home is a refrain I have started hearing with increasing frequency on the lips of the continent's ruling elite. For reasons of colonial shame and liberal guilt, these men confidently tell you, western governments - so open to attack from their media, so mercilessly pilloried before the court of public opinion - actually need to lend to African governments far more than African governments need to borrow from them. "Your western governments must be seen by their taxpayers to be helping us," they say, perhaps unaware of just how offensive this western taxpayer finds the unstated follow-up to that remark: "So we can do as we please."

Ignoring the entire issue of African performance, this past week's breast-beating over western failure to deliver on Gleneagles will have done nothing to convince a generation of African leaders, still living in a world in which luxury villages are specially built for AU summits and where four-decade terms in office are regarded as a cause for celebration rather than embarrassment, that aid is anything but a one-way street.

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