Those expecting Soyinka to tear his Green Card are childish in their reasoning – Birma

I t is sheer irresponsible to demand that Wole Soyinka, a professor and Nobel Laureate, should make good his threat to tear his Green Card following the victory of Donald Trump at the American Presidential election held last week.

Dauda Birma, a former education minister in the Sani Abacha regime, expressed the view in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay. “I think those clamouring that Professor Wole Soyinka should honour his threat by tearing his Green Card are being childish, reckless and irresponsible,” Birma said.

According to him, “Don’t forget, everything that Donald Trump said during the electioneering campaign was merely playing to the gallery.  Trump was just appealing to the conscience of certain elements of the American society by saying all that he said during the campaign; such words were not resonating with certain class of people that considered the utterances unwarranted and to the extreme.

“So, Professor Soyinka, being an international figure who had won a global award and highly recognised and revered in equal measure, responded with equally in a manner that conveyed a message that Trumps’ utterances were not all that courteous. Soyinka, as an international icon spoke out to represent the feeling of many right-thinking people across the globe. Don’t forget that given his clout, whenever he speaks, his words are weighty and respected.”

Birma, a former presidential aspirant on the platform of the defunct All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP), further said that Soyinka may have threatened to take a drastic step as a poet exercising his poetic licence, an expression only those operating at the highest level of intellectual frequency like himself (Soyinka) will appreciate.

Responding to a question as to whether it was reasonable or necessary in the first place for Professor Soyinka to have gone to the extent of exercising such a level of partisanship in the American election, the Adamawa State-born politician said: “What I want to tell you is that Trump’s grandstanding was equally matched by Soyinka’s grandstanding. It was an extremist view that attracted extremist response. Professor Soyinka spoke at a very high literary level.

I must re-emphasise that it is an irresponsible expectation for anybody to think that the Nobel Laureate should have by now torn his Green Card in line with whatever threat he made before the election.” Recall that Soyinka was quoted days before the US presidential election as saying that he would cut his green card, a permanent residence permit for the US and immediately leave the country if Trump was elected.

The report said Soyinka, a scholar-in-residence at New York University’s Institute of American Affairs, disclosed the plan in a speech to Oxford students.

“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. The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up,” he was quoted to have said.