If you, like us, thought last week’s petrol and diesel price predictions were already a little bleak, you won’t like what is in store for you today. After an extraordinary run for the country’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy — the official deciders of the prices at the pumps — which saw price decreases for fuel across the board for three months straight. That’s… likely to come to an end.

That’s what the Central Energy Fund (CEF) had to say, at least. And when the CEF speaks, we tend to listen — because it’s the closest thing to being an ‘authority’ on the subject when it comes to petrol and diesel price predictions. Last week, the CEF was predicting somewhat, for lack of a better word, “tame” figures to break the Department’s streak. That’s… not the word we’d use now.

Can we skip straight to March? Pretty please?

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still plenty of time for things to turn around before the Department has its way with the country’s fuel pumps. That’ll be taking place on Wednesday, 7 February for any petrol price prediction newbies.

There’s time for a turn-around because of how the CEF collects its data and arrives at the figures we’ve got down below. It looks at all the same data that the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy does — such as the average price of refined oil globally, and the month’s average Rand/US Dollar exchange rate used to purchase it — to arrive at a number that’s about as accurate as it can be.