Former environmentalist sacked by Tata Steel over far-right past

Former environmental campaigner Donald Pols has been sacked on the second day of his controversial new job at Tata Steel after it emerged he was a member of a far-right student group during his youth in South Africa.

Pols was a spokesman for the Afrikaner Studente Front (ASF), which opposed the abolition of apartheid in the early 1990s, and saw the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela, as a Communist organisation that threatened white South African culture.

He admitted being a member of the ASF in an interview with newspaper NRC, after historian Anne-Lot Hoek came across his name while researching a book about the apartheid era.

Pols took up his new job on Monday as Tata Steel’s director of sustainability and head of communications, to the consternation of his former colleagues at Milieudefensie, the Dutch branch of Friends of the Earth.

Tata Steel said on Tuesday it had terminated his contract with immediate effect. “In recent days, it has become clear that additional information about his background has come to light – information that has affected us and was not previously shared with the company,” the company said in a statement.

In April 1991 Pols was among a group of around 100 far-right students who disrupted a speech by Mandela in Pretoria, a year after his release from prison, by jeering him and jumping on the stage to fight with the ANC’s bodyguards.

Milieudefensie has since acknowledged that it knew about Pols’ political history since 2021, when he told Marty Smits, who was chairman of the organisation’s supervisory board at the time, about his involvement with the ASF.

In a statement shared with DutchNews, Smits said: “During our conversation, Donald clearly distanced himself from his past on all fronts and expressed regret. In his years at Milieudefensie, Donald committed himself to Milieudefensie’s mission, a just and equal planet.”

Burning flag

The flashpoint was reported in the Chicago Tribune, which quoted Pols as saying: “We did this to stir up the feelings of right-thinking white people.”

NRC also spoke to people who identified Pols as a man who was photographed holding a burning ANC flag while wearing a T-shirt with the emblem of an eagle.

Pols said he could not remember the incident, but admitted he regarded the ANC as “an organisation that would bring a Communist regime to South Africa and destroy the Afrikaner language and culture.”

He left South Africa in 1991 to study cultural studies in Maastricht and emigrated to the Netherlands permanently two years later. He told NRC his student days had been shaped by his upbringing in an ultra-orthodox religious community in segregated Transvaal.

“It’s disgusting behaviour, they were wrong views, very wrong views,” Pols said when NRC asked him about his past. “There’s no way of justifying it and I don’t want to. But I’m nothing like the person I was then.”

Shell court case

The 53-year-old led a high-profile court case to try to force Shell to cut its CO2 emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement.

Two weeks before leaving Milieudefensie, he announced a new legal challenge aimed at stopping the company developing new oil and gas fields.

Pols said his move to Tata Steel was a “logical next step” in his career of holding companies to account, but Milieudefensie chairman Marty Smits said the group was “surprised and deeply disappointed” by Pols’s decision.