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

“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed 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 surmised that his recent statements comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had summoned him 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 terminated his visa, referencing United States regulations that permit “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 lightheartedly remarked while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre. 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 said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His latest 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 did not rule out to accepting an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but continued: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

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

“This is not about me,” Soyinka declared. “When we see people being detained arbitrarily – people being taken away and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”

The ongoing immigration crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of intensive operations, as well as the restricting of legal means of entry.