Obama's Brother Accused Of Assaulting Two Of His 12 Wives And Seducing A Teenage Schoolgirl

On the broiling shores of Lake Victoria, a man in Islamic garb is making a politician’s sales pitch to a group of baffled villagers and the resident witch doctor — a wild-eyed character with green and pink parrot feathers in his hair. He is pontificating on an oddly familiar theme: a time for change.

Yet the man on the election stump in this remote part of Africa perhaps has more right than most to appropriate the message that helped Barack Obama become America’s first black president. For the tall, paunchy figure trying to win over the villagers is 55-year-old Roy Abong’o Malik Obama, half-brother of the U.S. President and now following his famous sibling into politics.

Today, Kenya goes to the polls to choose a president, members of parliament and senators, county  governors and members of the newly-formed county assembly. Malik is standing for the position of governor of Siaya County, a role which would see him leading nearly a million people. Average earnings here are 100 Kenyan Shillings (about 80p) a day.

Not that hardship looms for their putative new leader. If he wins, the newest Obama on the political block will hit the jackpot — earning an annual salary of more than £100,000, which would take an average Kenyan 66 years to earn, and is the equivalent of £3 million in Britain, as well as perks which include a ‘retirement bonus’ of £75,000, a car, driver, VIP travel and bodyguard for life.

This is not the first time I have observed one of President Obama’s brothers at close quarters. Last year, I reported in the Mail how George Obama, 30 — born to the fourth wife of the President’s father — also hoped to stand for political leadership in Kenya. I tracked him down to a shack in a Nairobi slum, where he spends his days drinking moonshine and boasting about his Oval Office connection.

Like George, Malik is not shy about trading on the family name. Glistening with sweat, a white Arabic skull-cap on his head, he was to be found at the weekend standing on the back of a pick-up truck exhorting people to: ‘Vote Obama — vote for change.’

As he addresses crowds, his followers hand out leaflets featuring photos of him sitting in the White House with his half-brother.

‘Malik Obama has international connections which can attract investment to build factories and manufacturing industries,’ trumpets the text. ‘Malik Obama is a new leader who will bring new direction to our county.’

The leaflets add that charity does not alleviate poverty — it can only be halted by ‘empowering poor, youth and women by tapping their potential’

There is only one problem with these promises: they do not, as I discovered this week, appear to have much substance. Certainly any ‘tapping of potential’ appears to consist of Malik chasing, marrying and divorcing young local women.

Indeed, female members of his extended family accuse him of being a wife-beater and philanderer, who seduced the newest of his estimated 12 wives while she was a 17-year-old schoolgirl — a crime in a country where the legal age of consent is 18.

To the dismay of teachers and the girl’s mother, Mary, Obama had secret trysts with the girl after spotting her attending prayers at the mosque he has built in Kogelo — he and his brother’s ancestral home — as part of his promotion of the Islamic faith across the country.

Now in hiding at her mother’s mud house, down a rutted track, Sheila Anyango, 35 years younger than her husband, told me this week that marrying him was the ‘worst decision’ of her life — and confirmed that they had ‘kept a secret’ since she was 17.

Shy and softly-spoken, Sheila, 20, says: ‘At first he was good, after he started speaking to me at the mosque. But he has changed. Marrying him has been the biggest mistake of my life. He beats me, but mostly he’s just nasty and quarrelsome.’

Mary, 36, whose husband died from malaria soon after she gave birth to Sheila, can barely contain her fury. ‘He abuses my daughter,’ she tells me. ‘He is a bad old man. She was a child at school. There was no negotiation with me.
‘He made a secret plan to take her away and gave her 3,000 shillings [about £24] to get her to marry him. She’s a young girl — she was confused. I just don’t like that man.’

Sheila, who has an 18-month-old daughter by Obama called Hafifa, had spent the past two years living with three of Malik’s other wives at the ‘Barack H Obama Foundation rest and relaxation centre’ — a restaurant complex built by her husband to profit from the visitors attracted to the area by his links to his brother.
Nor is Sheila the only one of Malik’s wives to accuse him of beating her.

Hafsa Abwanda, now 33, also  married the politician as a teenager, but escaped in 2008 after five years of marriage, saying he beat her and her ‘co-wives’, of whom she says she saw at least 12 come and go over  the years.

Before Hafsa fled her miserable  marriage to live with relatives, she had a son with Malik, who she took with her when she left. ‘He is a bad man and I don’t want to ever see him again,’ she says.
With Islam allowing only four wives, former wives and friends say Malik flouts this rule by ‘rotating’ his spouses out to other properties so he lives with only the maximum number at any one time.
Fabulously rich by Kenyan standards, Malik is nevertheless careful with his money.

He pays his staff at the Obama Foundation less than £5 a week — without breakfast, lunch or dinner — and his workers spoke openly about their dislike for their boss with the famous name.

‘He doesn’t give a damn about other people,’ one of his employees told me. ‘We all have wives and children and he doesn’t pay us enough to feed them. But he’s happy to give young women money to come and live with him here.