The dust has settled on Kigali’s African Union Summit of Heads of State. The most notable outcome from which was a non-outcome.

The West African states stood their ground. Flat out refused to accept what they considered an unacceptable slate of candidates for the position of AU chair. When they failed to open up the nominations, they simply refused to vote. Meaning none of the three candidates mustered the two-thirds support required under the Constitutive Act.

The elections for all AU Commission positions were postponed. Nominations will be done in October. Elections will now be held at next year’s January summit.

The current Chair, Nkosazan Dlamini-Zuma, and all commissioners thus hold their positions until next January as well.

Which, as many commentators on South Africa’s internal politics have mentioned, serves the political ambitions of the current Chair at home well.

She’ll stay above the nasty fray of African National Congress politics and return home with her nose relatively clean.

But the opening-up and deferral of the AU Commission elections also serves the African public well. We now have time to think about what we want from leadership.

To play more of a role in ensuring candidates who provide the aspirational, inspirational leadership we crave to make it through.

We weren’t able to play that role at the Kigali AU summit — closed to everybody outside of states and a selected part of the African women’s movement. That closure itself points to the way the AU’s current leadership has gone adrift.

The promise of the Constitutive Act was that the AU would be a union of both states and peoples. To posit that the heads of state need one summit a year unbothered by non-government types was not only an affront — it went against the letter and spirit of the Constitutive Act.

The determination of the West African states was encouraging in that sense. It signalled that some states feel the AU has been drifting off-course. It signalled too that they have higher expectations of leadership than the slate lined up before Kigali could offer.

There are so many urgent Africa-wide issues — in this region alone, the resurgence of long-term incumbency in the name of the “third-term.”

The horrendous treatment of civilians during conflict — and complete impunity for the same. The failure of settlements between the political elite to definitively end conflict. The resurgence of authoritarianism; this time dressed up with the fig leaf of electoral “legitimacy.”

The growing inequality —and the utter indifference of the political elite to addressing it. Africa may be “rising” but the majority of Africans are not.

Recalibrating determination of who’s under the poverty line and who’s now supposedly crossed it doesn’t address the scale of the problem.

We need an AU chair with the ethical and moral authority to speak to these issues—and have us believe that s/he means it, structural constraints of the position notwithstanding.

Somebody to inspire and motivate us. Africans with that standing must feature in the October nominations.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes