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The American authorities has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the renowned Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.

“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very satisfied with the cancellation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.

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

Soyinka speculated that his recent remarks comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

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

According to a communication from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have revoked his visa, referencing American government regulations that allow “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 quite peculiar love letter from an embassy,”

he lightheartedly commented while presenting the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre. He also advised any organizations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.

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

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

The existing US administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider clampdown on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were expressive 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 giving him praise,”

Soyinka explained. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

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

His most recent novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire 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 left the door open to entertaining an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

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

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

The current immigration crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens short-term arrested as part of aggressive raids, as well as the limiting of legal means of entry.