Despite the euphoria and hopes that followed the attainment of many Sub-Saharan African countries of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiatives, the region’s debt woe is at the center of global attention again less than 2 decades after the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, with varying consequences on their public finance, growth, and aggravation of poverty. Besides recent exogenous shocks to its economies due to the Covid-19 pandemic coupled with fall of exports, what be driving African countries closer to debt distress at such a high pace? Far from delving into the current controversy of trying to identify which country or institution is using debts as a geopolitical tool to entrap the region, this paper seeks instead to understand principal debt drivers, through evidence-based analysis using open-source yet reliable data from international financial institutions, while proposing actionable and context-sensitive policy reforms to address them.