President Barrack Obama wrote a letter to the Nairobi high court denying any claims to his father’s, Barrack Hussein Obama Senior, estate in a legal battle between his four wives.
Obama wrote the letter in July 1997, six months after winning the Illinois Senate seat, disavowing any claims he might have on his father’s estate, that was valued at about Sh 410,500 at the time of his death. The estate included the Sh. 55, 933 insurance money that up to date has never been paid to the beneficiaries. The money has since been moved to the Unclaimed Financial Assets Authorities.
Barrack Obama Senior was a Kenyan senior governmental economist who was born in 1936. He married in 1954 and had two children with his first wife, Grace Kezia Aoko Obama. He was selected for a special program to attend college in the United States of America, University of Hawaii where he met president Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The two got married in 1961 and divorced three years later after having a son whom he named Barrack Hussein Obama II.
He married another woman in 1964 and had two sons but later divorced in 1973 when he came back to Kenya. He worked in the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Finance. He had some conflicts with the Kenyan president Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and lost his job. He died in a road accident in 1982.
Three months after his death the fight over Obama senior’s estate started when some of wives got embroiled in a legal tussle over who among his wives he actually married.
“The colourful legal drama, which went on for years, pitted the first wife against the fourth, the eldest son against the youngest, and generally divided the family into two warring camps,” author Sally Jacobs writes in her book, “The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father”.
If that were true, then none of his subsequent three marriages—including the one with the president’s mother—would have been legitimate. A host of family members who took sides on the issue provided conflicting affidavits peppered with name-calling and insults.
President Obama, who was customarily entitled to the inheritance, notified the court in 1997 that he would wish to distance himself from a legal battle over Barack Obama senior’s wealth.
-Hekaheka