It can be easy to forget, looking back, the power of the spell Abiy briefly cast over Ethiopia and its western allies.

For a few heady months in 2018, his ascendance seemed to many as though it were divinely ordained, the nation's collective deliverance from years of sacrifice and suffering.

Over the previous four years, the multiethnic Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition government, in which Abiy had been a senior official, had been waging a brutal crackdown on the young demonstrators defying its autocratic rule.

Now, in his swearing-in speech in April 2018, Abiy asked, in a gesture without any precedent, for "forgiveness from the bottom of my heart".

He called for national unity and for talks with the opposition, urging for bridges to be built even with Eritrea, Ethiopia's mortal foe since 1998.

"For us, building democracy is today an existential matter," he intoned, "more than it is to any other country." Ethiopians all over the country clapped and cheered before their television screens.

In a juice bar in Adama, a city in Oromia, Abiy's home region, a middle-aged woman and her family watched the event underneath the large poster of the new prime minister she had pinned to the wall.

"There is nobody on Earth as happy as me," she said.

Far away in the distant south, people celebrated by slaughtering camels, cows and goats.

All around the world, Ethiopian diaspora sang and danced into the night.