THE Chamber of Mines’ economics department said on Thursday that, owing to “a double counting error”, gold output for last year had been overstated by more than nine tons (9379,5kg). South Africa’s true gold production for 1998 was 464,4 tons which was 5,7% lower than the previous year’s output of 492,5 tons. During the first quarter of this year, the Chamber said South African mines had produced 111,4 tons of gold — 6,4% less than the previous quarter (119 tons) and 4,22% down on the same quarter of 1998 (116,3 tons).