Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was on Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve his country’s conflict with bitter foe Eritrea, the Nobel Committee said.

Abiy was honoured “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea,” the jury said. Since becoming Ethiopian prime minister in April 2018, the 43-year-old has aggressively pursued policies that have the potential to upend his country’s society and reshape dynamics beyond its borders.

Within just six months of his swearing-in, Abiy made peace with bitter foe Eritrea, released dissidents from jail, apologised for state brutality, and welcomed home exiled armed groups branded “terrorists” by his predecessors. More recently he has turned to fleshing out his vision for the economy while laying the groundwork for elections currently scheduled to take place next May.

Born in the western town of Beshasha to a Muslim father and Christian mother, Abiy “grew up sleeping on the floor” in a house that lacked electricity and running water. “We used to fetch water from the river,” he said in a wide-ranging radio interview with Sheger FM last month, adding that he didn’t even see electricity or an asphalt road until the seventh grade. Yet Abiy progressed quickly through the power structures created by the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), after it took power from the Derg military junta in 1991.

Fascinated with technology, he joined the military as a radio operator while still a teenager. He rose to lieutenant-colonel before entering government, first as a securocrat — he was the founding head of Ethiopia’s cyber-spying outfit, the Information Network Security Agency.
He then became a minister in the capital Addis Ababa, and a party official in his home region of Oromia. The circumstances that led to Abiy’s ascent to high office can be traced to late 2015.

A government plan to expand the capital’s administrative boundaries into the surrounding Oromia region was seen as a land grab sparking protests led by the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, and the Amhara people. States of emergency and mass arrests — typical EPRDF tactics worked to quell the protests but failed to address the underlying grievances.

When then-prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn abruptly resigned, many feared a power-struggle within the EPRDF, or even an unravelling of the coalition that would leave a dangerous vacuum. Instead, the coalition’s member parties chose Abiy to become the first Oromo prime minister. “He’s the only one that could have saved the EPRDF,” said Mohammed Ademo, a journalist who accompanied Abiy on his first visit to the large Ethiopian diaspora community in the United States last year. “My feeling is that he’s prepared for this moment all his life.”