NATIONAL: No plan to apply for restoration of my US Green Card –Soyinka

NOBEL laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has said that he will not consider restoring his US Green Card even with the inevitable exit of US President, Donald Trump, from the White House tomorrow.

Soyinka made this known in a recent interview with TheNEWS, an excerpt of which was published today.

Joe Biden will succeed Donald Trump as the 46th American President on Wednesday having defeated the incumbent President in the November 3 presidential election.

Reacting to Trump’s defeat and the likelihood of restoring his Green after the reign of a man he considered unworthy of being the number one citizen of a nation recognised as the most powerful nation on earth, Soyinka said, “Why should I rush to restore the duplication of my status? No, I shall not be applying for restoration of the Green Card any time soon. One green document (the Nigerian passport) will more than suffice,”

Six days before the US election in 2016, Soyinka was quoted by the UK Guardian as telling a student audience at Oxford University’s Ertegun House that he would destroy his Green Card if Trump won the election.

“If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that. The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up,” said Soyinka, who was, at the time, a scholar-in-residence at New York University’s Institute of African-American Affairs.

After Trump was announced winner of the election, Soyinka repeated the vow in an interview with The INTERVIEW Magazine, saying Trump’s victory had “brought an already teetering world closer to the precipice”.

The promise to destroy his Green Card, occasioned by his now confirmed belief that Trump was a catastrophe on two legs, earned the Nobel laureate plenty of mockery in certain quarters in Nigeria.

He described his view, which he shared with TheNEWS, as “my last quack on Donald Duck”.

 “From now on, any invitation to revisit the subject will be re-directed to prior statements, which are available in print – interviews, publication series such as INTERVENTIONS etc.etc,” he said.

Soyinka described Trump as a political hustler who, despite his character deficits, “did humanity the favour of laying out his divisive, anti-human political agenda well in advance”.

He explained that his decision to give up his Green Card was because he no longer wanted to part of a society that elected “a self-revealed racist demagogue, a fascist in every fibre of his being, as its president”.