The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.

I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.

Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.

There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.