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The US administration has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been vocal about Trump since his earlier presidency, Soyinka disclosed 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, addressed a press briefing.

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 remarks comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and led 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 stated he would not attend.

According to a communication from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have terminated 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 somewhat unusual love letter from an embassy,”

he lightheartedly commented while reading 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 said.

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

The current US administration has made visa revocations a defining feature of its wider restrictions on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were outspoken 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 commented. “He’s been conducting himself as a dictator.”

The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at 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 commentary 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 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 denounce the ramped-up 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 apprehended and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what troubles 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.