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The United States government has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been outspoken about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka stated on Tuesday.

“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a media gathering.

Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

Soyinka suggested that his recent remarks comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have provoked a reaction and led to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka mentioned earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reevaluate his visa, which he declared he would not attend.

According to a letter from the consulate directed at Soyinka, officials have terminated his visa, invoking American government regulations that authorize “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.

“This is a somewhat unusual love letter from an embassy,”

he jokingly stated while presenting the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub. He also told any organizations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka declared.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, indicated it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The present US administration has made visa revocations a signature of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably affecting university students who were vocal about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka mentioned he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he stated Trump “should be proud of”.

“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,”

Soyinka said. “He’s been acting like a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has lectured at and been awarded honours top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.

His latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a critique about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka described the book as his “gift to Nigeria”.

In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka remained open to entertaining an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but stated: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to condemn the escalated arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka emphasized. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being apprehended and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what troubles me.”

The recent immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.