Your problem is ignorance. Sometimes, I feel embarrassed to be a Nigerian," Soyinka blasts trolls Over Green card Saga

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Saturday, came hard on those asking him to tear his US Green Card as he vowed to do once Donald Trump, won the US presidential election.

Online commentators have been daring the revered playwright to carry out his threat which he reportedly made few days before the election since Trump had won.

But Soyinka, in a statement he signed titled, “Red card, green card– Notes towards the management of hysteria”, described the online commentators as “noisome creatures” whose ignorance resonates largely on whatever they comment on.

On tearing the card, he said: "I have been asked several times – interestingly only by the foreign media, with the exception of THE INTERVIEW – whether indeed I did make such a statement at any time, and whether I still intended to carry it out, and the answer remains a categorical ’Yes’.

If it even becomes convenient to bring it forward, I intend to do so, but please don’t come at me with plaints of time imprecision. I never discussed it with you, nor invited you to a private decision whose execution was already in the making.

Do not try to browbeat me. It’s a waste of time – all you have to do is immerse yourselves in my antecedents. It will not attempt to deal with the notion of an exit time-table as conceived by others.

I simply fail to understand why this has gone beyond a flurry of public commentary and hilarious cartoons, and turned into a masturbatory for some, a vomitory for others, and an epileptic sanatorium for a self-reproducing number.


Let me end with a Red Card to those noisome creatures, the nattering nit-wits of Internet: maybe Trumpland is not as despicable as the Naijaland you impose on our reality from your secure cesspits of anonymity.

Go back to school. Your problem is ignorance, ignorance of whatever subject you so readily comment upon. Learn to study your subject before opening up on issues beyond your grasp.

Sometimes you make one feel like swapping one green for another, out of embarrassment for occupying the same national space as you.’’