The figures for South African mining are becoming a bit of a guessing game. After December’s slump, January’s production figures bounced back strongly, increasing 7.3 per cent year-on-year.

That’s after analysts had predicted a drop of 4.2 per cent, based on the sporadic industrial unrest and other factors. The rise snapped a run of four months of decline.

The drivers of the production boost were diamonds and iron ore – diamond production increased 55 per cent year on year, contributing over 1 percentage point to the overall mining increase. Iron ore was up 33.4 per cent in January, but given its relative size, contributed more: 4.8 points of the percentage change. The overall month-on-month change was a 5.5 per cent increase, after a 6.1 per cent fall in December.

Predicting mining production figures is tricky given not just the nature of extraction, but the recent problems with worker relations. There was industrial action in January at Anglo American Platinum, but it didn’t cause a significant dip: platinum group metal production was roughly flat. Gold production was down 8.1 per cent year on year, but that couldn’t derail the overall mining increase.

One of the reasons that gold production was down looks to be alleviated. Harmony, one of the bigger South African gold miners, announced on Thursday that the Kusasalethu mine will reopen in stages. The mine has been shut since December 20.

But amid the good news comes another setback. This time, it’s a fire at an electical sub-station run by state utility Eskom on Wednesday which halted work at mines that account for more than 20 per cent of South Africa’s gold output. The power outage has affected miners AngloGold Ashanti and Sibanye Gold (the recently-reated spin off from Gold Fields).