Kenyan-born U.S. citizen Malik Obama, who is Barack Obama’s half-brother, has once again criticized his sibling for not supporting the extended Obama family back home in the village of Kogelo, Kenya. Malik called the former U.S. president “cold and ruthless” while urging Americans to reelect President Donald Trump in November instead of his brother’s former vice president, Joe Biden.
The 62-year-old half-brother of Barack was speaking to the New York Post on Saturday via Skype from his home in Kenya following the release of his new book, Big Bad Brother From Kenya.
“He got rich and became a snob,” Malik said of his brother Barack. “What I saw was he was the kind of person that wants people to worship him. He needs to be worshiped and I don’t do that. I am his older brother so I don’t do that.”
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Malik and Barack share the same father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Kenyan economist who passed away in a car accident in 1982, according to The New York Post. Three years after his death, Malik met his half-brother Barack for the first time. Barack was then a 24-year-old Chicago community organizer and the two had a close relationship for decades before they fell out with each other.
Their strained relationship first began when Barack became president and issues arose as to which of his Kenyan relatives would be invited to his inauguration. Then things got worse after Malik told Barack of plans to set up a foundation named after their father – the Barack H. Obama Foundation.
Barack, who had then just been elected to the White House, was against the idea, fearing that the Barack H. Obama Foundation would be confused with him.
“We had a big fight on the phone because he was not in support and insisted I shut down the website and not continue with the foundation. He had his reasons but I was not having any of it,” Malik writes in his self-published memoir which he spent 22 years writing, according to the Post.
“We talked late into the night that night. He threatened to ‘cut me off’ if I continued with the idea.”
Malik went ahead with the foundation, which got into trouble with the law in 2011 when it claimed to be a tax-exempt nonprofit while it had not registered as such.
Then in 2014, Malik claimed that he asked his brother for help in burying their aunt Zeituni Onyango.
“We needed to pay for the bills and the cost of her transportation back to Kenya,” Malik writes in his 435-page book. “[Barack] asked me how much and I told him roughly $20,000. This was too much he said.”
Barack eventually gave the family $5,000.
“She really had been good to him,” Malik writes. “I don’t understand how somebody who claimed to be a relative or a brother can behave the way that he’s behaving, be so cold and ruthless, and just turn his back on the people he said were his family.”
Malik has in the past also expressed his displeasure with Barack’s “very business-like” and “very formal” reception toward him when he visited the White House in August 2015.
Then in 2016, Malik, who has dual citizenship in Kenya and the U.S., made headlines after saying he was supporting Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Malik’s decision to support Trump ignited online conversations about the meeting points, if any, between politics and ideology and the good old tradition of standing up for your family.
Many were quick to note that while Malik reserved the right to support any political party or lean toward any ideological movement, his actions, which seemed to be aimed at slighting his brother, appeared to be motivated by jealousy and spite.
After four years, Malik’s stance hasn’t changed.
“[I’m] 110% still with Trump,” Malik was quoted by The New York Post. “He’s not fake. He tells us the way he sees it. He’s bold and fearless and he’s tough.”
He also mocked his brother’s former vice president and Democratic nominee Biden as someone who “looks like he’s going to drop dead.”
“I don’t think he’s going to make it. His teeth are falling off,” Malik said of Biden.
