The nanny state has already decreed how much exposure – precisely none – we are to be allowed character-sapping tobacco and booze advertising.

Now it is the turn of Cape Town, which revels in its casting as the “mother” city, to embrace parental control. It is not only going to dock our pocket money if we are naughty but will also confiscate our toys.

Errant motorists caught with a cellphone in their hands while they are driving will not only be fined, but the instrument will be confiscated for 24 hours. If they resist handing it over, they will be arrested.

Mama Pat, the Democratic Alliance mayor, is giving her prefects free rein with the big stick. Who knows what’s next? Maybe second offenders could lose their phones and have to write as punishment a thousand lines.

Repeat offenders could have their cellphones and car keys confiscated.

They might be gated for a month, except for Saturdays, when they would have to make their pedestrian way to the nearest Metro police centre, where they’d have to weed flower beds and empty dustbins.

While confiscation will “help people get the message”, Safety and Security mayoral committee member JP Smith declares officiously, “We’re hoping that we don’t have to confiscate any phones. We’re losing lots of money through the additional administrative tasks. It’s the officers’ time, the admin.”

Does anyone else hear in Smith’s words the echo of pompous insincerity of headmasters long forgotten? “Bend over and touch your toes, boy. It’s for your own good. This hurts me as much as it is going to hurt you.”

No one is arguing that it is not demonstrably dangerous to drive and be on a cellphone  simultaneously. Fine offenders by all means.

However, Cape Town is actually the one city where the road death toll is decreasing steadily. So, rather than statistics justifying the new confiscation policy, as the DA claims, it is evidence that this school-prefect approach is an exercise in excessive civic zeal.

It is also likely unconstitutional. Attorney Andrew Pike believes the law, also being contemplated in KwaZulu-Natal, would fail a Constitutional Court challenge.

Pike cites the constitution’s rights to “just administrative action” and to access to the courts if accused, as well as the prohibition on “arbitrary deprivation of property”.

Confiscation is also bad in other ways. It means that doctors, emergency workers, the vulnerable, and an array of one-man-and-a-cellphone businesses are going to be telephonically incommunicado for 24 hours on the say-so of a traffic cop who might just have a chip on his shoulder that is bigger than his brain.

There are lessons from the past about bureaucratic fiat that one might expect the liberal DA to be sensitive to.

Do we really want  a system of administrative justice where petty officials play the role of cop and judge again? Seized cellphones are different only in scale, not in principle, from bureaucrats invalidating at the stroke of a pen residential permits or passports.

Arbitrary confiscation is over the top, probably illegal and as arrogant in its indifference to rights as is, say, the blue-light convoys that ordinary citizens have to put up with.
But Mama knows best and never, never backs down.