The present study focuses on the development of indebtedness in Africa. But the analysis can easily be extended to other countries of the South. It shows that the coronavirus pandemic and its many consequences aggravated a former situation of indebtedness but was not its cause. The pandemic was the catalyst, though all the ingredients of a new financial crisis have been present for several years, at least since 2017-2018. It highlights the dramatic social and economic consequences of the current health crisis, as well as its huge impact on public finances and indebtedness, both in the North and in the South. Finally, it shows that what the International Financial Institutions (IFI) have contributed are false solutions and that there are alternatives. More fundamentally, it demonstrates that the logic of the capitalist system has to be questioned to get to the roots of African countries’ indebtedness