Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, wants those mounting pressure on him to tear his green card to wait until January 20 when Donald Trump will be sworn into office as president of the United States.
Responding to a question on Trump’s emergence during an interview with Newsweek, the literary icon said: “Why don’t we wait until Trump actually takes office?”
“I’m just going about my normal commitments, but definitely not getting into any more commitments. Let’s put it that way for now.”
Last week, Soyinka threatened to destroy his green card – his US residency permit – if Trump won.
“If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that,” he had told students of Oxford University, England.
“The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.”
Soyinka is a scholar-in-residence at New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs.
After Trump was declared president-elect, the comment at Oxford started gaining traction, with many particularly on social media, asking the scholar to match his words with action.
In the Newsweek interview, the playwright also said Trump’s emergence could jeopardise US support in Nigeria’s fight against insurgency.
He said Trump’s “bunker mentality” could see the US withdraw support for counter-terrorism operations in West Africa.
“One should expect that level of collaboration to diminish. Trump’s mentality is one of, ‘What are we doing there? What business do we have over there?’” he said.
“I foresee Trump dismissing that kind of expectation offhand and closing in, shrinking, becoming smaller in terms of [the U.S.’s] presence in other parts of the world.”