I'm sure you gentleman will appreciate the irony of hearing that I'm now in the same boat

The ping bumps up to between 130-200ms on the 3rd hop, which makes it look suspiciously like our own network, but I get the same experience on a SAIX connection.
Our senior network engineer did some further investigation for me this evening and pointed out an over utilized edge service router in the Western Cape which is showing increased latency. The problem is that the ESR is essentially invisible in the tracert due to VRF so it's not a straight forward matter to establish which one you're routing through.
I'm going to do some further investigation regarding this tomorrow and I'll share what I can in terms of what we can expect with regards to the escalation of faults like this and Telkom's time lines on addressing them.