Get Guardian on GoogleBy Steve Sinikiem Azaiki
Some books tell stories of success; others reveal the struggles, sacrifices and quiet courage behind it. Gold Dust, the memoir and autobiography of Dr Ayima Lott-Jonathan, does both. Published in 2026 to mark her 50th birthday, it is a deeply personal account of a woman who journeyed from the creeks of Bayelsa State to the heart of Nigeria’s capital, where she built an enduring educational institution.
Readers who know the Niger Delta mainly through headlines about crude oil, militancy and pollution should read Gold Dust. Dr Ayima Lott-Jonathan has written a memoir that is personal before it is anything else. It also tells a story about our region that is rarely told: an Ijaw woman, raised between the creeks of Bayelsa and the streets of Port Harcourt, who left the Delta and established a lasting institution at the centre of the federation.
I wrote the Foreword to this book, where I reflected on the author’s character and faith. Here I want to read it differently: as a document of the Niger Delta’s place in the Nigerian project, and of what education can do where politics and oil have so often failed.
Born in Yenagoa, Ayima is a reminder that behind every accomplished woman lies a journey the world may never fully see. Through her university years, marriage, the joys and pains of childbirth, the heartbreak of miscarriage, and the fears and dilemmas surrounding her decision to marry, she invites readers into the private moments that shaped her public achievements. Her honesty makes the book deeply human. She does not merely celebrate the victories; she allows us to understand their cost.
The book’s first interlude, “Of Rivers and a New State,” is among the most valuable passages for any reader trying to understand our part of the country. The author was born in Yenagoa in 1976, in what was then old Rivers State. Bayelsa State was created in 1996 under military rule. As she notes, it was carved out of a political temperature that had become dangerous. She also reminds the reader of a fact many Nigerians have forgotten: Oloibiri, where commercial oil was first struck in 1956, lies within Bayelsa. “It is a strange, bitter kind of irony,” she writes, “to have been born on some of the most valuable ground in the entire country and to have grown up, as so many of our people did, without the basic comforts that ground’s own wealth had built elsewhere.”
Those of us who have spent our careers on the political economy of the Niger Delta have written that sentence in many forms. It carries special force from someone writing from lived memory rather than research. She sets it beside a frank picture of oil-boom Port Harcourt, where her family lived on the “professional-class rather than oil-money” edges of the Government Reserved Area. Together they show the contradictions of a region that was, at once, the engine of the national economy and one of its most neglected corners.
The book also respects traditional authority, which I welcome. The author’s father, His Royal Highness Festus Dikebi Lott, Ogbian VIII, the Ebeneken of Famgbe, is a distinguished lawyer who served as Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice.
Her mother is Chief Mrs Veronica Lott, the Igefina I of Atissa Kingdom. The memoir shows how those roots shaped the author. Her name, Ayima, means “His will be done.” Her family chose a burial in Abuja for a brother killed in an accident rather than the customary riverside burial, and she explains that custom with care rather than condescension. Even her near drowning on the Ekule River, when a speedboat’s wake overturned her canoe, reminds us that for riverine people the waterways are both a lifeline and a hazard.
The most telling detail in the book is small. When she was introduced to the man she would marry, simply hearing her father’s name “was apparently enough to make my husband sit up and listen properly.” In our culture, a family name carries a reputation, and this book is in part a daughter’s account of living up to one.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Gold Dust is the founding of Aduvie International School in 2008. What began in a rented five-bedroom bungalow in Wuse, Abuja, with just four staff members and two pupils, has grown into a major educational institution sitting on 6.1 hectares and serving more than a thousand children. This is not simply a story of building a school; it is a story of vision, faith, resilience and the courage to begin when success is far from guaranteed.The author is honest about the bank loan, the unfinished building, and the strict statutory requirements for registering a school. She is equally honest about the tragedies that test any institution, including the death of a student in a road accident.
As someone who has devoted much of his life to education, public service and institution-building, I appreciate the determination required to transform a modest beginning into an enduring legacy. I am particularly moved by the establishment of the Jewel Class for children with additional needs. It demonstrates that education is not merely about academic excellence, but also about compassion, inclusion and ensuring that no child is forgotten.
The Jewel Class commenced in 2008 because one mother kept asking for help for her child with Down’s Syndrome. In Nigeria, special-needs provision has long been left to chance and charity, so building it into the structure of a mainstream school is a real contribution to policy, not only to pedagogy. Furthermore, the school’s work in the community: classrooms for host communities, sponsorship of examination fees, and support for an orphanage. These show an understanding that I wish more of our institutions shared.
A school that does not lift its neighbours has not done its job.
I also note, with some admiration, that she declines to expand. She has repeatedly been urged to franchise Aduvie, or to found a university, and she has declined. A pre-university programme was tried and then honestly rested. In a country where institutions are often founded faster than they can be sustained, this kind of discipline is itself a form of leadership.
The memoir also offers a glimpse into the delicate balance between marriage, family and personal ambition. Ayima’s husband’s journey into the highest office in the land could easily have become the central theme of her story. Instead, she reminds us that a woman can stand beside great public power while building an identity and institution of her own. Her achievement is not defined by proximity to power, but by what she has created through her own determination.
Gold Dust is in part a study of a woman’s independence beside great public power. The author’s husband rose, through a series of unexpected appointments, to the country’s highest office. The book gives that public story only lightly. Her real subject is the choice to build something of her own, measured on its own terms. She calls herself “a kind of cushion” for her husband in his hardest seasons, but the institution she built stands on its foundations, not his. Young women from the Delta, and from across Nigeria, will find this example more useful than any amount of public display.
Nevertheless, the long section of goodwill messages at the end of the book will matter most to those who know the author, while general readers may want it shorter. Hopefully, a later edition will develop the author’s ideas on educational policy in the Delta. Her experience at Aduvie gives her authority to speak on how Bayelsa and its neighbours might build schools that keep their brightest children at home, and the book only touches on it.
Overall, Gold Dust is a sincere, readable and often moving account of a life built patiently. Read from the Niger Delta, it is something more: evidence that the region’s greatest resource was never the oil beneath its creeks but the people who grew up beside them. I commend it to educators, policymakers, students of the Delta, and every young person who has had to wait longer than seemed fair for a door to open.
As an Ijaw son of the Niger Delta, I read Gold Dust with particular pride, especially as I have known the author for about three decades. Our region is too often portrayed through the language of oil, environmental degradation, and conflict.
Ayima’s story presents another narrative: one of intellectual capacity, enterprise, courage, and contribution to the Nigerian nation. She has carried the spirit of her roots into the wider world and demonstrated that the daughter of the creeks can build something of lasting national significance.
The title,Gold Dust, is fitting. Gold is not always discovered in grand places; sometimes its value emerges through patient effort, hardship and perseverance. Ayima’s life reminds us that the true measure of achievement is not merely what one acquires, but what one builds, whom one serves and what one leaves behind.
Ultimately, Gold Dust is more than a birthday memoir. It is a testament to womanhood, motherhood, faith, resilience and the transformative power of education. I commend it to young women, educators, policymakers and all who believe that humble beginnings need not determine the limits of a person’s destiny. Dr Ayima Lott-Jonathan’s story carries a message worth remembering: the circumstances of our beginnings may shape us, but they need not define how far we can go or how many lives we can touch.
•Professor Steve Sinikiem Azaiki, OON, is Pro-Chancellor and Chairman, Ritman University, Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom State, and Executive Coordinator, African Policy and Research Consortium
