MTN loses touch with customers during 'system migration' and denies legal upgrade

I went into MTN Long Beach on 3 November to take advantage of my upgrade. I chose a phone and a package and all was going well until I was told that an upgrade wasn't possible. Apparently, MTN was migrating customers to a new system and I couldn't get an upgrade because I hadn't been migrated yet. They phoned HO and this was confirmed and I was told to come back in a few days or weeks - they couldn't say when the upgrade would be made possible. It is now 23 days since first encountering this problem.

My current phone is broken - I can't make or receive calls or SMSs. I can only use WhatsApp. Being self-employed and using my cell phone for work, this has been disastrous over the past few months. But I've been hanging on because my upgrade was available from November. Now it's almost December and MTN has done nothing to address this issue.

I have tried to get help on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I have begged for someone to help me sort out this problem and enable me to take out the upgrade that I am legally entitled to according to my contract. I even sent a LinkedIn message to the CEO and, of course, had no response. With every comment I post, a standard reply comes back saying how sorry they are and they'd be happy to help me - then nothing. They eventually just stop replying. End the conversation and in one case 'Natasha' (I assume this is not a real person but just a persona MTN creates to interact with real people) actually made 'herself' unavailable on Messenger - essentially terminating contact.

I've been an MTN customer for over 20 years - never missed or even been late on a payment in all that time - and I am disgusted with how I've been treated. I'm not a real person to you, MTN. I'm an inconvenience. A drop in the ocean of your millions of customers that you don't actually give a damn about.