Review of Eziwho Emenike Azunwo's "The Last Resort"

Book Title: The Last Resort 

Author: Dr. Eziwho Emenike Azunwo 

Reviewer: Origbenba Godprince Victor

Publisher: 

Year of Publication: 2026

Institution: Rivers State University, Port Harcourt 

Department: Theatre and Film Studies

Introduction

Eziwho Emenike Azunwo's The Last Resort (2024) is a searing dramatization of academic corruption and victimization within the Nigerian university system. Azunwo, whose body of work consistently interrogates the ethical decay of Nigeria's institutions, here turns his critical gaze inward, toward the ivory tower he himself inhabits as a lecturer in Theatre and Film Studies. The play's title carries deliberate institutional weight: it names the university Senate as the final arena of appeal for a student wronged by an examiner who wields grading as an instrument of power. As the play's foreword by Rev. Don Kester Oshioreame observes, Azunwo is unusual among stakeholders in exposing "the ills inherent within" his own professional community, refusing the more comfortable posture of critiquing only politicians or external institutions. Told largely through flashback and frame narrative, The Last Resort uses the ordeal of one student, Nhenome, to expose a wider culture in which grades are negotiable, victimization is systemic, and justice, when it comes at all, arrives diluted and compromised. The play situates itself within the tradition of Nigerian campus and institutional drama, using storytelling technique, satire, and courtroom-style confrontation to press its case for reform.

Synopsis of The Last Resort

The play opens on the last day of examinations for final-year Theatre Arts students at the University of Dumbaria. While his classmates celebrate, Nhenome remains sober and reflective, eventually announcing that he has "a story to tell" — one he insists his friends record for posterity so that the silent suffering of students might be exposed. The narrative then folds into an extended flashback to his second year, when result boards reveal a catastrophic failure rate in GES 100.2, a general studies course taught by Dr. Ginigame. Nhenome, a diligent student, discovers he has scored a mere 19%, a result he refuses to accept given his strong performance in a parallel course. Distressed, he consults his parents; his mother turns to prayer while his father counsels caution, warning him not to provoke the "academic gods."

Nhenome's case gains traction when Onu, a sympathetic lecturer and family friend, personally escorts him to Dr. Ginigame's office. Ginigame is evasive and combative, accusing Nhenome of cheating and citing handwriting discrepancies between his coursework and his exam script as proof, despite the fact that Nhenome's rewritten sample matches his original hand almost exactly. Ginigame first offers to correct the score, then reverses himself when the rescored script yields an even higher grade, revealing that his real objection is not academic integrity but a refusal to be challenged. He dismisses Nhenome from his office, daring him to escalate the matter to the Senate.

Emboldened by fellow students, Omenudo, Ovunotoi, Funebi, Moses, and others — who debate whether resistance is worthwhile or merely reckless, Nhenome pursues the case through the Dean of Faculty, who confirms Ginigame's cheating allegation but advises formal petition to the Senate. Nhenome drafts and submits a meticulously structured letter of complaint. He is subsequently summoned before a Senate committee of professors, some of whom mock his discipline and manufacture a compromise verdict that neither vindicates nor fully condemns him, protecting Ginigame as a fellow academic. Frustrated students stage a protest that draws police intervention and arrests. The conflict finally reaches an open court presided over by the Vice Chancellor, where Barrister Ejiofor cross-examines Ginigame, who deflects blame onto the entire university system, implicating the VC, the Registrar, ASUU, and the federal government in a shared culture of institutional failure. The hearing widens into a sweeping indictment of academic victimization, sexual exploitation, and financial corruption across the university. The Vice Chancellor is visibly shaken by the revelations and pledges reform, declaring that "Ginigame, your days are numbered".

The play returns to its frame, where an older Nhenome reveals the anticlimactic aftermath: Ginigame was never formally punished, going instead on sabbatical before returning to a humbled public persona and eventual promotion to professor. The success rate in the course improved after his removal from it, but institutional accountability remained incomplete. Nhenome closes by affirming his hope of one day returning to the university as Ginigame's colleague rather than his student, and calls for a broader reorientation of staff and students toward a more humane academic culture.

Themes

The concept of theme, as Morris Weitz notes, denotes the underlying meaning a literary work communicates through the interaction of its characters, plot, setting, and dialogue (Weitz, 2002). In The Last Resort, several interlocking themes emerge from this interaction.

Academic Corruption and Victimization: The central theme of the play is the abuse of academic authority for personal gratification and control. Dr. Ginigame's manipulation of Nhenome's grade, and the wider testimony offered before the open court, exposes a system in which lecturers exploit their power over grading to extract sexual favours, financial gain, and unquestioning deference from students, reducing academic assessment to an instrument of exploitation rather than merit.

Institutional Complicity and Silence: The play repeatedly shows how the structures meant to check abuse (departments, faculties, Senate committees) instead protect wrongdoing lecturers. The professors who quietly agree to shield Ginigame despite recognising his misconduct exemplify how institutional loyalty routinely overrides justice, allowing corruption to persist unchecked.

Faith and Resilience: Nhenome's recourse to prayer, and his mother's spiritual intervention, run throughout the play as a counterpoint to institutional failure. Faith becomes both a coping mechanism and a source of resolve, sustaining Nhenome's pursuit of justice even as human institutions repeatedly disappoint him.

Justice and the Limits of Institutional Recourse: The Senate, framed as "the last resort" for aggrieved students, ultimately delivers only a partial and compromised justice. The play interrogates whether formal appeal mechanisms within Nigerian universities can genuinely deliver accountability, or whether they merely absorb and defuse grievance without altering underlying practice.

Gender and Sexual Exploitation in Academia: Testimony before the open court reveals a pattern of lecturers demanding sexual favours from female students in exchange for grades, and of students who allegedly use indecent dressing to solicit favour. The play surfaces this uncomfortable dynamic as a pervasive and normalized feature of campus life rather than an isolated abuse.

Youth Activism and Collective Resistance: Nhenome's individual grievance grows into a collective student movement, complete with protest and confrontation with police. The theme affirms the power of organized, courageous agitation in the face of entrenched institutional power, even as it acknowledges the personal risk such activism entails.

Characterization

Nhenome: The play's protagonist and moral center, Nhenome is a determined, articulate, and principled student whose name, meaning "things are happening" in the Rundele dialect of Ikwerre, foreshadows his role as a catalyst for institutional reckoning. His refusal to accept an unjust grade, his persistence through multiple levels of appeal, and his continued faith amid setbacks mark him as an emblem of youthful resistance to entrenched corruption.

Dr. Ginigame: The play's antagonist, Ginigame is a manipulative and self-protective lecturer who wields grading as a tool of intimidation. His shifting justifications, his invocation of a fabricated "professional cheating code", and his eventual deflection of blame onto the wider system reveal a man skilled at evading accountability while implicating everyone around him in the same rot he embodies.

Onu (Mr. Akujuru): A sympathetic lecturer and family friend, Onu represents the rare figure of integrity within the academic hierarchy. His willingness to challenge a colleague on Nhenome's behalf, at some professional risk to himself, positions him as a moral counterweight to Ginigame.

Omenudo: Nhenome's steadfast friend and frequent interlocutor, Omenudo provides comic relief through his banter but also serves as a genuine ally, accompanying Nhenome through his ordeal and voicing collective student solidarity.

Ovunotoi: Another close friend of Nhenome, Ovunotoi balances humor with pointed commentary on the students' predicament, often puncturing naïve optimism with pragmatic, sometimes cynical, observations about the realities of campus politics.

Funebi: Representing resignation and fatalism, Funebi doubts the wisdom of confronting "academic gods" and prefers to accept the carryover system rather than risk conflict. She embodies the psychology of a student population conditioned into passive acceptance of institutional abuse.

Mummy and Daddy: Nhenome's parents personify two contrasting responses to institutional injustice, his mother's spiritual faith and emotional support, and his father's cautious, somewhat resigned counsel to avoid confrontation with authority. Together they reflect a generational anxiety about challenging entrenched power.

The Vice Chancellor: Presiding over the climactic open court, the VC is portrayed as increasingly alarmed by the scale of corruption revealed before him. His late awakening to the depth of institutional rot, and his promise of reform, underscore the play's suggestion that meaningful change requires leadership to confront uncomfortable truths it has long ignored.

Barr. Ejiofor: As prosecutor in the open court, Ejiofor drives the confrontation with Ginigame, repeatedly pressing him to account for his conduct, only to be met with deflection that implicates the entire institutional hierarchy.

Language and Style

Azunwo's dramaturgy blends naturalistic campus dialogue with heightened satirical exchange, moving fluidly between formal English, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo expressions to capture the layered social texture of Nigerian university life. This linguistic code-switching marks status, intimacy, and irony: Ovunotoi's aside that he is speaking "fake French", or Funebi's admission that she lacks the "liver" (courage) to challenge a lecturer, root the dialogue firmly in campus vernacular even as the play's central conflict is deadly serious. Ginigame's proverbial self-defense before the open court, his rhetorical question, "who amongst us here is not a sadist?", exemplifies how figurative language is deployed to deflect personal culpability onto a shared, systemic guilt. Nhenome's own declaration that his name means "things are happening" functions as an authorial signature, embedding symbolic meaning directly into character naming. The play's stage directions are similarly precise, orchestrating rapid "carpet crossing" scene transitions between flashback and frame narrative that keep the storytelling technique visible to the audience throughout.

Dramatic Techniques

Frame Narrative and Flashback: The play is structured as a story told by an older Nhenome to his friends, with the bulk of the action unfolding as an extended flashback, allowing reflection and hindsight to colour the dramatization of past injustice.

Storytelling Technique: Azunwo foregrounds oral narrative convention, having Nhenome directly address his friends (and by extension the audience) as witnesses whose duty is to "spread this story like wild fire", reinforcing the play's function as testimony.

Satire: Sharp comic exchanges is also noted in the play, particularly Ginigame's evasions and the Senate professors' theatrical questioning of Nhenome's discipline, expose institutional hypocrisy through irony and humour.

Courtroom Drama Structure: The climactic open court scene borrows the confrontational rhythm of legal cross-examination, using repeated rhetorical formulas ("I put it to you") to escalate tension and structure the play's most damning revelations.

Symbolism: The Senate, cast literally and figuratively as "the last resort," symbolizes the fragile promise of institutional justice, while the handwriting comparison motif symbolizes the arbitrary and manufactured nature of the accusations levelled against Nhenome.

Comic Relief: The banter among Nhenome's friends — particularly Omenudo and Ovunotoi, punctuates the play's grave subject matter, easing tension while reinforcing camaraderie among the student body.

Socio-Political Commentary

The Last Resort is unmistakably a commentary on the state of Nigerian tertiary education, addressing the manipulation of grading systems, the sexual and financial exploitation of students, and the complicity of academic institutions in shielding wrongdoing colleagues. As the foreword notes, the play deliberately widens its critique beyond the classroom, drawing an implicit parallel between the corruption Azunwo exposes in the academia and the broader tacit rivalry between the Nigerian federal government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), suggesting that the rot afflicting the ivory tower mirrors the rot afflicting the nation at large. Ginigame's own courtroom deflection, in which he implicates the Vice Chancellor, the Registrar, ASUU, and the federal government alike, extends the play's critique to the entire chain of educational governance, refusing to isolate blame to a single villain. In this sense, the university becomes a microcosm of Nigeria's wider institutional dysfunction, where corruption is sustained not by individual malice alone but by collective, structural complicity.

Comparative Perspective

The Last Resort belongs to a wider tradition of Nigerian institutional and campus drama that uses satire and symbolic confrontation to expose systemic failure, echoing the concerns of Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants and Ola Rotimi's Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again in its unsparing depiction of authority abused. It shares closer kinship with Femi Osofisan's activist theatre, which similarly refuses to reduce social dysfunction to a single culpable figure, instead implicating entire systems of complicity. Within Azunwo's own oeuvre, The Last Resort stands alongside Inconsequential and Akpako Master as part of a sustained interrogation of power, responsibility, and institutional integrity across different sectors of Nigerian public life. Where Akpako Master trains its lens on the political assembly and Inconsequential on broader educational failure, The Last Resort narrows its focus specifically to the lecturer-student relationship, demonstrating the breadth of Azunwo's social vision and his consistent commitment to theatre as an instrument of civic conscience.

Critical Evaluation

Strengths: The play's greatest strength lies in its unflinching willingness to expose corruption from within the very institution the playwright serves, lending the critique unusual authenticity and moral courage. Its skilful blending of Pidgin, Igbo, and English dialogue grounds the drama in a believable campus milieu, while its comic interludes prevent the narrative from collapsing into unrelieved grimness. The courtroom-style climax is dramatically effective, using escalating rhetorical confrontation to widen the play's critique from one corrupt lecturer to an entire institutional culture.

Weaknesses: The play's didacticism is pronounced, particularly in the Vice Chancellor's lengthy closing remarks, which read more as policy recommendation than dramatized reflection, leaving little room for audience inference. The resolution is also unsatisfying in its ambiguity: Ginigame's eventual promotion to professor, despite the damning revelations against him, undercuts the sense of justice the play otherwise builds toward, and the play does not fully reconcile this outcome with its earlier calls for accountability. The frame narrative device, while effective for exposition, occasionally slows the dramatic momentum, particularly during the extended dialogue among Nhenome's friends.

Conclusion

Eziwho Emenike Azunwo's The Last Resort offers a courageous and deeply personal indictment of corruption within Nigeria's academic institutions, using the ordeal of a single student to illuminate a system in which grading power is routinely weaponized against the vulnerable. Through Nhenome's protracted pursuit of justice, from departmental office to Dean, to Senate committee, to open court, the play demonstrates both the resilience required to challenge entrenched authority and the limits of institutional mechanisms designed, at least nominally, to deliver fairness. Azunwo's use of storytelling technique, satire, and courtroom confrontation strengthens the play's critical force, while its eventual, imperfect resolution underscores a sobering truth: that institutional reform is slow, incomplete, and vulnerable to the same complicity it seeks to punish. Ultimately, The Last Resort affirms that meaningful change within Nigeria's universities demands not only individual courage but a fundamental reorientation of institutional culture toward accountability, transparency, and genuine regard for the dignity of the student.