Dear Editor,
OUR fellow Guyanese, we address you because you are our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, our mothers, our neighbours, our cousins and other extended relatives. We live in the same towns, villages, and some of us are from the city of Georgetown. We attended the same schools, churches, masjids and temples. We are one with each other.

More specifically, we have served to protect you in your homes, in your streets. Wherever there was a fracture to the social fabric of society, you called on us and our unswerving duty demanded that we respond to your call. We kept you safe by keeping in custody the delinquents from our communities. We are dispersed from our own families to far-flung interior locations to secure and defend our national sovereignty on our borders. Over the years and even recently, our brothers suffered the ultimate price with their lives.

We endured severe sacrifices. The emoluments we received could hardly have compensated for the hardships and deprivations we suffered. Our families who, were at home, were not immune from the separation and social dysfunctioning occasioned by our absence.

Our greater family of Guyanese, we served for you all. We are all of Guyana. There is absolutely no recognition of ethnic distinctions, religious affiliations, nor gender differentiations. We served you, for you and for the land of our birth.

Our fervent plea at this time is for our currently serving brothers and sisters to be afforded the same dignity and respect enjoyed by all eligible members of the Guyanese society who voted at the March 2020 General and Regional Elections. Members of the Joint Services who voted in the Elections must have their votes totally counted; it is their constitutional right. That right must not be forfeited by any act of malfeasance, ineptitude, ill will, nor victimisation. The duties and attestations to duty inhibit these loyal Guyanese of the Joint Services from publicly ventilating their personal desires and aspirations for the outcome of their votes.

We who served empathise with their pain and suffering, and are competent to speak on their behalf. Our appeal is; rather, our demand, to the duly Endowed Authority is that the votes for members of the Joint Services be counted for all of the ranks who exercised their franchise for the Parties for whom those votes were cast.
This is their legitimate right, as it is, the right for all Guyanese who exercised their franchise.
Byron W. Henry,
Director of Prisons (Retired)