The body politic is definitively broken.

Nobody can deny that ethnicity underscored the campaigning for the General Election of 2013. Not, of course, directly or openly. But indirectly and unashamedly.

In the electoral strategies — the calculations of supposed voting blocs and how to get them on board and the alliances thus made. In the electoral propaganda — where new levels of uncensored vitriol were reached.

Now that the half of the body politic that wanted this has “won,” a formal and official retreat is underway. Accompanied by no small amount of irritating entreaties to power to be magnanimous about sharing power ethnically. And no small amount of equally irritating entreaties to the rest of us to be nice to one another.

The online vitriol is slower to pull back into the station, however. It is, apparently, liberating to express hate “legitimately” — or at least for the “legitimate cause” of assuring ethnic hegemony.

The entreaties to both power and the rest of us are irritating because they elude and evade the problem. Power was “won” on the back of an ethnically hegemonic agenda — why on earth would it cede ground now?

The ethnically hegemonic agenda posited that we are mortal enemies and cannot be trusted farther than we can be thrown — why on earth would we suddenly turn around and be nice to one another?

What this forces us to confront is that every single effort we have made over the past two decades to constrain power, to ensure that power is more equally distributed, has failed.

We’ve pointed to the facts that highlight ethnic hegemony — whether we are talking about the joint Ministry of Planning and National Development and Society for International Development’s seminal report on income, regional (read ethnic) and gender inequality, or the National Cohesion and Integration Commission’s report on ethnicity in the public service.

We’ve created new ministries and public commissions — the Ministry of State for the Development of Northern Kenya and Other Arid Lands, or the NCIC itself. We’ve tried to better distribute national revenue — think here of the weighting according to the poverty index of the Constituency Development Fund.

We’ve even tried (and failed spectacularly) to put past “grievances” onto the public agenda. This was what the floundering Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission was meant to do.

But the era of acknowledging and redressing the past is now squarely over. We are back to notions of “willing seller, willing buyer” when it comes to land.

To hell with the anachronistic notions of pre-colonial ethnic boundaries. It is not “realistic” to even talk about colonial and post-Independence land dispossession.

How would we deal with competing and overlain claims to land? If we acknowledged the underlying ethnic claim to land, how would we satisfy it? Who represents the ethnic? No, it is more convenient to shove it under the carpet. Again. And keep our security services ready to prevent any possible fire next time.

The last little glimmer of hope is whether or not we realise devolution. But we shouldn’t hold our breath. If institutions haven’t helped us address ethnic hegemony in the past, they are unlikely to help us address it moving forward.

Like a colleague said, much as we can to condemn the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission or the Supreme Court, the problem is not, in the end, our institutions.

“The problem is in the body politic.” The online vitriol is, at least, honest — we have broken it. Let us, therefore, not beg power to fix it. Or, even worse, sheepishly ask ourselves to kiss each other’s wounds to help them heal.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is doing her graduate studies at L’Institut d’etudes politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, France