Is Patrick Yarde ‘president for life’ of the GPSU?

Back in the days when every Guyanese family reared their own chickens, a ‘yard fowl’ was a person given to toadying and sycophantic behaviour just to receive favours. The real ‘yard fowls’, of course, lived in their owners’ yards and depended on scraps from the kitchen table: they just couldn’t scrounge a living on their own any more. Sadly, the disappearance of “family” chickens has not made ‘yard fowls’ extinct.

We wonder if GPSU’s Patrick Yarde’s name is like his nature? Here is a fellow who no one can remember when he actually worked in the public service – but he seems to be ‘president for life’ of the union. He’s at least a decade past the retirement age for public servants, but he’s not about to let go of his public service scraps. They are very rich pickings, since they are deducted from the public servants’ salaries even before they touch them.
Anyhow, every now and then Yarde remembers to make some squawks just to show he’s earning his keep. For the past few years, the government’s been unilaterally granting public servants greater-than-expected raises so Yarde is hard put to justify his takings. He just makes some noises about conditions at the Nursing School – something that the administration had already been addressing!
Only last year $345 million was injected into the nursing training programme. Yarde, seemingly in the middle of an identity crisis, jumped up and down like a “fowl cock”. He served a one-month ultimatum on the Ministry of Health. Minister Bheri Ramsarran had to remind the nursing tutors: “Don’t let that old politician masquerading as a trade unionist fool you.” Bheri was being “ministerial”: was he really thinking of “that old yard fowl…”?