Gideon Sunday Tseja was born on the plateau village of Atte, Kogi State, 73 years ago in 1946, He is the third of five siblings. He went to primary school at Atte and Akabe in the same state; secondary school at Dekina, also in Kogi State and Bida in Niger State. A graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and the University of London in the UK, he began and ended his career as a teacher-trainer from 1971 to 2013 in the Institute of Education (IE), Ahmadu Bello University.

Gideon Tseja was Head of English Department at the Advanced Teachers’ College (College of Education), a constituent of IE, 1977 — 1981; Vice Principal (Deputy Provost), 1979 — 1985; Head of Division of Open and Distance Learning at the IE headquarters, 1985 — 1995 and Deputy Director of the IE, 2011 — 2013 when he retired. Gideon Tseja is a specialist in course materials development for open and distance learning (ODL) and was a consultant to the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). He led the team which designed the house style for course materials of NOUN. He was also a consultant to the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the ODL organisation of the Commonwealth based in Vancouver, Canada. As a consultant for COL, he ran ODL training courses at the Nigerian Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) in 2011and at Technical and Vocational Teachers’ College, Luanshya, Zambia, in 2014.

Outside normal academic activity, Tseja is a keen book publisher. He noticed that Nigerian academics were having difficulty in getting published. He set up the Tamaza Publishing Company Ltd in 1989, long before his retirement in 2013 and they have published over 50 titles in Education, Law, Literature, Chemical Pathology and so on. In addition to his numerous academic writing, he is also a biographer who has published the biographies of Steven in Akiga, Justice Umaru Eri and Senator Amadu Ali.