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The US administration has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning playwright who has been critical about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.

“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very content with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed a news conference.

Soyinka once had permanent residency in the United States, though he discarded his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.

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

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had requested his presence for an interview to reassess his visa, which he stated he would not attend.

According to a document from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, invoking US state department 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 quite peculiar love letter from an embassy,”

he humorously 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, pointing to confidentiality rules.

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

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

“Idi Amin was a man of worldwide recognition, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was giving him praise,”

Soyinka said. “He’s been conducting himself as 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 critique about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka referred to 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 considering 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 condemn the escalated arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being arrested publicly – people being hauled up and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what worries me.”

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