Businesspeople in the capital city of Nairobi must register their protest in the most vigorous civil terms possible at the charade of violence and looting disguised as mass action protests that have rocked the Nairobi central business district (CBD) and downtown this week.

In fact, the taxpaying business community feels betrayed by the non-taxpaying non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and so-called extended civil society sector, all of who receive billions of shillings from donors and other sources and who were at the centre of these riots. Every time civil society feels like rampaging through the CBD and other parts of Nairobi and urban Kenya, tax- and rates-paying businesspeople bear the brunt of their behaviour.

The events of last week were particularly reprehensible. Under the banner of so-called mass action a small band of professional agitators and rent-a-crowd rioters have harassed the National Assembly, the police and the people of Nairobi for no reason than to try and enforce their version of the constitutional review process.

We all looked on with mounting horror and disgust as well-fed, well-educated and grossly overpaid NGO agitators first calmly announced that they would mount marches on Parliament and other disruptive events and then proceeded to do so in front of the cameras of the local and international media.

Some of these persons were dressed in at least four layers of branded T-shirts. They wielded large-format-print banners and placards.

They would have Kenyans believe that all this protest paraphernalia was prepared on the spur of the moment sometime on Monday, when they declared the "mass action’’ programme. Evidently these material was prepared quite some time ago, as was the mass action intimidation and violence programme designed to rock the capital city and heckle the National Assembly as it went about its legitimate legislative business — the final lap of the new constitutional order. One of the principal ideologists and professional rioters even had the temerity to stand in front of an anti-riot police water cannon truck as media (and non-media) cameras clicked away (see colour photo on Page 2 of the Standard of Wednesday July 20). In doing so he assumed the stance of the lone protester standing before the rolling tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989. Is all this choreography of rioting spontaneous? I think not.

This pretentious forgery of "spontaneity’’ did not end with these ridiculously-aped stunts. Almost everything about the "mass action’’ outrages of this week was a sham.The rioters should be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny on the following points:

• How much did each layer of branded T-shirt really cost some unsuspecting donors somewhere? How many of the T-shirts were actually branded and distributed against the financial claims being made for them after the riot? It would be interesting to see a donor ask for the paperwork and insist on seeing every receipt. As every branded T-shirt and wide-format-printing producer can tell you in this town, political activists of all hues and stripes have long made a killing by inflating the quantities and cost of all manner of protest and, or campaign paraphernalia.

• There was talk of a million-signature petition, including in Parliament, all week. The logistics of collecting a million signatures up and down Kenya must have been tremendous. How many people were involved in this onerous task?Are there ID numbers to go with the names and signatures?

• Is it not high time that CBD businesspeople and other city residents compelled rabble rousing politicians and tax-free money-minting NGOs and activists to pay for the damage to life, limb and property that the thieving festivals disguised as "mass action’’ inflict on Kenyans?

Civil society must be subjected to the same rigorous required standards of transparency, accountability and tolerance of alternative viewpoints that they demand of all other persons and entities in a governance capacity.