Stuck with a new unusable MTN contract with no assistance forthcoming from MTN

The sim card for cell number *** was delivered to me on the 30th of July in response to my online application for a 100 gig contract with MTN (50gig anytime data and 50gig night owl) and since then I haven't been able to use the sim card and dealing with MTN's call center and stores has been a nightmare.

The initial problem was that the sim wasn’t Rica registered within the two to three days that the delivery guy had said it would be registered in. To get this done myself then required two trips to an MTN shop in galleria as after the first trip I discovered the sim was still not rica registered despite the store clerk telling me she had registered the sim. After it had been registered on my second trip to the shop it still didn’t allow me access to the internet. On the 8th of August I contacted the MTN call center, this resulted in me having to make numerous calls to the call center over two days as every new agent who answered offered a different solution to my problem which did not actually solve it.

In the end it was identified that a fixed LTE barring keeps activating on the line despite the sim card being in an LTE router. In two instances the agents removed the barring, sim worked for a few minutes and then it went off again. The last agent I spoke to told me that this would keep happening as long as the sim was in a router that it had not been issued with from MTN. This is a sim only contract and nobody told me before I took the contract that it may have trouble working on other routers and I am certain the router I am using is neither network locked nor faulty as I am currently able to use my sim from Vodacom on it although the router was issued by Telkom.

Till today I am unable to use the new contract. On the 10th of August I escalated my query to MTN complaints and since then I’ve only received an automated response confirming the receipt of my complaint and nothing more. I am now at a loss as to how to solve this; I’m stuck with an unusable contract, a call centre that is unable to help and a complaints department that is non-responsive. If anyone has any ideas of how I can get out of this contract; please help. If it helps; the automated response from MTN gave me *** (I’ve since resent the complaint twice) N.I. Dube