The increase in South Africa's consumer price index, which is used by the South African Reserve Bank for its inflation target, was up 8.6 percent year-on-year in February from 8.1 percent y/y in January, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday.

This means that the declining trend has been broken. Previously there had been a five monthly decline after the record 13.6 percent registered for CPIX - the old targeted measure - in August last year and the 13.7 percent for the old CPI in August.

CPI was up 1.2 percent month-on-month after increasing 0.4 percent in January. Economists react to the CPI data:

Mike Schussler, T-Sec:

"This is a nightmare figure. Although only half-a-percent up on January, we were expecting inflation to remain flat. This puts the whole inflation outlook in doubt and suggests that some of the interest rate cuts we thought we would get may not be as steep as we had hoped.

"We were looking at cuts amounting to at least another 200 basis points over the remainder of the year, but it now looks as though we may only see cuts amounting to 100 basis points."

Doret Els, Efficient Group:

"It came in above expectations. We had that petrol price increase last month and it also shows that food prices are quite sticky and don't want to come down as much as they go up."

Carmen Altenkirch, Nedbank:

"It's not a good number, but we were expecting an increase mainly due to the higher fuel price in February as well as the increase in services inflation, such as medical costs.

"Overall, we do see inflation easing due to weaker global and local demand."