Interest rate hiked without my knowledge

I have a revolving credit with your bank and I went to the Branch to enquire how much it will cost to settle it. They provided me with the quotation and I had a few questions and upon going through my agreement the Service Consultant realized that my interest rate had been increased over the years and I was not made aware of this - not even by email.

1. I was retrenched last year and around October we discovered that the credit had been reduced from R249K to R192k which is fine by me. 2. I then submitted my retrenchment letter and the credit was ultimately stopped due to the fact that I was unemployed from November to March this year. 3. The insurance had been paying the "installments" during the period when I was unemployed 4. When I started working in April I called the bank asking of I can reduce the installment from R6k per month to something I can afford and I was told no, my account is not in arrears therefore I cant make a payment arrangement. I will need to fall into arrears first before making that arrangement. However, I could reduce the repayment amount on the app which I did. 5. When we checked the interest rate today it has increased from 16,05% to a whopping 21,05% an increase of 5% from the 15th June 2023.

No one told me about this increase and I would also like to find out what informed this interest rate hike? It seems very off to have it increased by 5%. Your leanding rate at Capitec is 9,3% meaning I am servicing this debt and your rate plus 11,75%. Make it make sense?

As things stand, I only have 2 active credit accounts- yours and Nedbank credit card of R5000. I also know that this had nothing to do with my credit score because I have recently been approved for a homeloan by another bank at incredibly low interest rate. How do you increase it by 5%? I have never missed any payment of this loan before. Why was I not told about this adjustment on the 15th of June 2023? Your Consultant called me on the 15th May 2023 and told me that the debit order will be initiated on my account because I am now working and I told her that I had been paying the access facility from the end of April anyway. Was that the problem, that I got retrenched and therefore need to suffer the consequences of retrenchment- but increasing it by 5% from our initial agreement still makes no sense at all. I need someone to call me and fix this then tell me how much I need to pay to settle or how much you need to pay me back from this mess.