BY EVELYN DADU, ABUJA – Prof. Wole Soyinka, who in 2016 tore his American immigrant visa to shreds after the emergence of Donald Trump as President of the USA, on Wednesday said America has redeemed itself by voting out Trump from the oval office.
In an interview with ARISE Television on Wednesday, the Nobel Laureate said, “I feel honoured to be associated with the democratic forces of the United States for correcting the unbelievable error that they committed four years ago.”
He said he was no longer interested in renewing his green card, adding that he only goes “in and out as a visiting alien and that is good enough for me.”
According to Soyinka, “The complacency was very painful and I said if you people are so careless as to let this racist, this monster, this xenophobic aberrant, this disrespect of the female gender, this serial bankrupt, this man who called your own society a shithole country, if you are so careless as to let him become the next President, I am moving out.”
The Nobel Laureate, who said he was happy with the attack on the Capitol, noted that the incident portrayed the need for Americans and the world to understand and appreciate the fragility of democracy.
“So, you can imagine what I have felt over the last few weeks, the siege on the Capitol. In a way it was rather heart-warming for the Americans themselves to feel that what they have been fighting for is not really a given in their society and they had to confront it in a brutal unbelievable way and they came out of it in flying colours.
“It is not over not by any means, I don’t say that for a single moment but it has been a lesson for us in this continent and we should be grateful that it did happen. I am sorry of course about the loss of life, I regret the disruption of normal life but now we are placed on the same playing level, that we are all fighting for the same virtue in human conduct, the same system we all believe in that you cannot take it for granted, not anymore and for us here in Nigeria, it has been, I hope, it was been a heart-warming occasion.”
