Kenya's rival parties were stuck yesterday over how to share power despite pleas from home and abroad for quick resolution to a crisis that has killed 1,000 people and wrecked their nation's reputation.

Foreign powers and the majority of Kenya's 36 million people are impatient for President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to find a political solution to the east African country's darkest moment since independence in 1963.

Their dispute over who won the December 27 election unleashed protests and ethnic attacks that have traumatised the population, displaced more than 300,000 people, and hurt Kenya's image as a stable democracy and peacemaker in the region.

"The time for a political settlement was yesterday," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the end of her trip to Kenya to push for a power-sharing deal.

Apart from hardliners on both sides, a similar message is reverberating round Kenya from businessmen, clerics, grassroots groups and ordinary citizens, who are increasingly angry with the political class for allowing the crisis to drag on. But yesterday's resumption of negotiations, at a plush Nairobi hotel, yielded no breakthrough on the crucial issue of how Mr Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) and Mr Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) can come together in government.

The government team is resisting calls by Dr Rice, mediator Kofi Annan and other western powers to allow a power-sharing deal or "grand coalition". The opposition wants a virtually 50:50 arrangement, with a powerful job like a new Prime Minister's post for Mr Odinga and a new vote in two years. Government negotiator Mutula Kilonzo bristled when reporters quoted Dr Rice to him as he walked into the afternoon session.

"Those are her own views. This is not America, this is Kenya. We have a Constitution," he said, noting a sub-committee was formed to discuss the issue of "structures of governance".

"We have a system of laws. I believe we are going to come to a reasonable arrangement."