For several years, government has been promising to cut the unnecessary red tape undermining entrepreneurship and stifling investment. For this reason, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment of business luminary Sipho Nkosi as his red-tape-reduction czar has been welcomed. That welcome has been a cautious one, however, partly because previous promises in this regard have failed to deliver much visible progress and partly because of the current administration’s seemingly insatiable appetite for mostly well-intentioned but debilitating regulation.