Never-ending Damaged Bag Repair/Replacement

My mother's suitcase was damaged on a flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg in July 2017. She reported it at the BA baggage services counter at ORT and as she had no other bag the attendant advised us that we could bring the bag in at our earliest convenience and opened a ticket and gave us the reference number. We took the bag in in early September 2017 with the reference number and the attendant took the bag and our telephone numbers and said they will contact us when the bag was ready. We did not hear anything and in early November I checked again at the ORT counter and the attendant took all our telephone numbers again and the reference number and said they would call us when they had followed up with their agent. We did not hear anything more for another month. Again in late November I went to the counter and after being ignored for half an hour the attendant took our telephone numbers and reference number and said they would call us when they had followed up with their agent. It is almost a week later and we have not heard anything. I am beginning to wonder if BA Comair do actually offer a baggage repair/replace service or whether it is just a ploy to appease passengers until they forget about their bag and replace it themselves. I do not understand how the service cannot be integrated with the "agent" such that the progress at the "agent" can be tracked over the internet.