'Why not wait until Trump takes office?' Soyinka To People mounting pressure on him to tear his Green Card
Responding to a question on Trump’s victory
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
Oxfprd 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 for 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 [US] presence in other
parts of the world.”
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