Divide in road safety body

Executive director of the Barbados Road Safety Association (BRSA) Sharmane Roland-Bowen says breaches to its constitution led to the determination that the March 18 election was null and void.

However, road safety advocate Michael Brathwaite, who said he was elected during that process, insisted that they did nothing wrong.

Instead, he described the events that have taken place since then, including the ushering in of a totally new executive, as a hostile takeover.

“The nominations, the signup, election, were run by everyone in your [Roland-Bowen’s] circle, and then you turn around and said there were breaches? What breaches? There was nothing wrong with the election. They did the counting, they issued everything . . . nothing went wrong from what I could see,” Brathwaite said.

He made those comments yesterday following a press conference at Cooperators General Insurance, Upper Collymore Rock, St Michael, which the BRSA held to announce the new executive.

The new executive includes president Roland Lowe, first vice president Maria Holder-Small, second vice president Livingston Headley, public relations officer Erskine Cumberbatch, secretary Bridgette Marshall-Griffith and treasurer Dwight Mapp. Pastor Jamal Medas is the chair of the Victim Support Committee.

Brathwaite leads Barbados Driver Training Advisory Services and said he was consulted several months ago to help the BRSA revamp, following Roland-Bowen’s resignation in late 2022.

“I put a lot of time into BRSA since the beginning of January and it would be a shame to walk away, take up all of our information and go because we’ve done a lot, created a lot of things that we can use for the public, schools, and universities.

“We’re meeting this evening to go through the old constitution, the one hat she originally gave us and that we’re working with and start to implement some of the changes to the new Constitution that we intend to submit [to CAIPO].

“It’s gone from a six-page constitution to about 18 pages because of a situation where someone can do a whole hostile takeover of an association a week after elections . . . you have to make sure things like that don’t happen again,” Brathwaite said.

Earlier that day, Roland-Bowen who was the president of BRSA from 2012 up until November 2022 when she resigned to pursue ministerial studies told the Weekend Nation: “On May 7, 2010, the BRSA Inc. was founded as a nonprofit organisation with three directors as required under the Companies Act of Barbados.” (TG)