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The American authorities has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning playwright who has been critical about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka disclosed on Tuesday.

“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very content with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed a media gathering.

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

Soyinka suggested that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have caused offense and led to the US consulate’s decision.

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

According to a communication from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have revoked his visa, invoking 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 humorously remarked while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub. He also informed 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, said it could not comment on individual cases, pointing to confidentiality rules.

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

Soyinka mentioned he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he remarked 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 showing him respect,”

Soyinka explained. “He’s been behaving 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 newest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka called 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 considering 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 denounce the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

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

The current immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens briefly held as part of targeted actions, as well as the restricting of legal means of entry.