Junaid Akbar: Biography, Political Career, Public Accounts Committee and Role as PTI’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa President (2026)
Junaid Akbar is a three-time member of the National Assembly from Malakand who defeated Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in 2018. In January 2025 he became chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and president of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This plain-English profile covers his career and both roles.
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⚡ The short answer
Junaid Akbar is a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf politician from Malakand in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He has won his National Assembly seat three times, in 2013, 2018 and 2024. In 2018 he defeated the PPP’s chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. In January 2025 he was given two important posts within two days: chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly, and president of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, replacing the then Chief Minister, Ali Amin Gandapur.
- ✅ Born in 1977 in Malakand district
- ✅ Member of the National Assembly for NA-9 Malakand; oath taken 29 February 2024
- ✅ Won in 2024 by more than 70,000 votes
- ✅ Elected unopposed to chair the Public Accounts Committee on 24 January 2025
Who is Junaid Akbar?
Here is the simplest way to place him. Junaid Akbar is a constituency man who was suddenly handed two national jobs.
For eleven years he was a backbencher. He won his seat in the hills of Malakand with bigger margins each time, made loyal speeches and held no office. Outside his province few people knew his name.
Then, in one week in January 2025, Imran Khan made him the party’s chief in its strongest province, and the National Assembly made him head of its most powerful committee. He had gone from the back row to the front in a few days.
Junaid Akbar’s rise shows how the PTI has changed since 2023. With its best-known faces in prison or gone, the party has turned to solid local winners whom the wider public is only now getting to know.
Malakand
He was born in 1977 in Malakand district. His family home is in Thana, a town in Batkhela tehsil. His National Assembly profile gives his father’s name as Sultan Rome.
Malakand is a small, mountainous district north of Peshawar. A famous pass carries the road from the plains up to Swat, Dir and Chitral. Whoever holds Malakand holds the gateway to the north.
| Malakand | |
|---|---|
| Where | Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, between Mardan and Swat |
| People | Pashtuns, mostly of the Yusufzai and Utmankhel tribes |
| Main town | Batkhela |
| History | Governed for a century as a special “protected area” under its own rules, separate from the settled districts |
| A lasting effect | For decades the wider Malakand region was exempt from most federal taxes; ending that exemption is a hot political issue |
| Politics | Once a stronghold of the PPP; won by the PTI since 2013 |
That last line matters for his story. Malakand was one of the few places in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the PPP had deep roots. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was popular there in the 1970s, and the party kept winning the seat for decades.
The tax question
One local issue follows every member from this region to Islamabad.
Malakand was part of the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas. Laws passed by Parliament did not apply there unless specially extended, and its people paid almost no federal taxes. In 2018 a constitutional amendment merged all the tribal areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The special legal status ended. The tax exemption was kept for a transition period and has been extended several times since.
Each federal budget now brings the same argument. The finance ministry and the International Monetary Fund want the exemption phased out. Traders and factory owners in Malakand, Swat and Dir shut their shops in protest. Members of the National Assembly from the region, whatever their party, lobby to have it extended again.
Supporters of the exemption say the region is poor, was neglected for a century and suffered years of militancy and military operations. Critics say it has become a loophole: factories set up there to avoid tax and sell their goods across the country.
It is the kind of bread-and-butter question on which a constituency member is judged at home, whatever national posts he holds.
Three elections
| Year | Seat | His votes | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | NA-35 Malakand | 51,312 | Won, defeating a candidate of the JUI-F |
| 2018 | NA-8 Malakand | 81,310 | Won, defeating Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of the PPP |
| 2024 | NA-9 Malakand | About 113,500 | Won as a PTI-backed independent; the PPP’s candidate received 40,740 |
The constituency’s number changed each time as boundaries were redrawn. The area stayed the same.
2018: beating Bilawal
The 2018 result made his name.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, then twenty-nine and fighting his first general election, stood in three seats. One was his family’s home in Sindh, which he won easily. One was in Karachi, which he lost. The third was Malakand.
The PPP chose Malakand to show that it was still a national party with support among Pashtuns. Bilawal campaigned there in person. He lost to the sitting member.
For the PPP it was a painful sign of how far it had fallen outside Sindh. For Junaid Akbar it was proof that his hold on the seat was personal as well as partisan.
2024: a landslide
In February 2024 the PTI had lost its election symbol, and its candidates stood as independents. That is why the assembly’s website lists his party as “IND”. He nevertheless won by more than 70,000 votes, almost three times the total of his nearest rival.
Trouble inside the party, 2024
After the 2024 election the PTI formed the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur. Junaid Akbar was appointed the Chief Minister’s focal person in the National Assembly, a liaison between the provincial government and the party’s members in Islamabad.
It did not last. The provincial party was dividing into camps.
- One camp supported the Chief Minister.
- Another, which included several senior figures from the Malakand and Mardan regions, accused him of ignoring party workers and of running the province through a small circle.
The quarrel came into the open when the Chief Minister dismissed a provincial minister, alleging corruption. Junaid Akbar and another member of the National Assembly took the sacked minister’s side. They were then removed from their party positions. Press reports said the group took its complaints to senior party figures.
At that stage he looked like a man on the losing side of an internal fight.
January 2025: two posts in two days
Then the wheel turned.
24 January: the Public Accounts Committee
The National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee had been without a chairman since the election, almost a year earlier. By convention the post goes to the opposition. The PTI and the government could not agree on who it should be. The party’s first choices were unacceptable to the government or tied up in court cases.
In January 2025 the deadlock broke. The PTI put forward a panel of names, and Junaid Akbar was elected unopposed.
25 January: the party presidency
The next day Imran Khan, from prison, named him president of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He replaced Ali Amin Gandapur, who had held the party post alongside the chief ministership. The official explanation was that one man could not do both jobs.
The effect was to hand the party organisation in the province to the very group that had been complaining about the Chief Minister.
The Public Accounts Committee explained
This is the more important of his two jobs for the country at large, so it deserves a close look.
What it does
Every year the Auditor General of Pakistan examines the accounts of each ministry, division and state-owned body. The auditors write up every payment that broke the rules, every sum that cannot be traced and every contract that looks wrong. These “audit paragraphs” run to thousands of pages.
The committee’s job is to go through them.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Auditor General lays the audit reports before Parliament |
| 2 | The committee takes up one ministry at a time |
| 3 | The ministry’s top civil servant, called the principal accounting officer, appears in person |
| 4 | Members question him on each audit objection |
| 5 | The committee settles the objection, orders money recovered, or refers the matter to an investigating agency |
| 6 | Its recommendations are reported to the house |
Why the opposition chairs it
The tradition dates from 2008. The idea is simple: a government should not audit itself. If the chair belongs to the opposition, embarrassing findings cannot be buried.
The tradition has been bent more than once, and each new assembly brings a fresh argument about it.
Its limits
- It looks backwards. Audit reports reach it years late, and the officials responsible have often retired.
- It has a backlog of many thousands of unsettled audit objections.
- It cannot punish anyone itself. It can only direct and recommend.
- Its members come from all parties, so the chairman needs their cooperation.
💡 Tip: why should an ordinary citizen care?
Because this committee is where you find out what happened to your taxes. Its hearings are where a secretary to the government has to explain why a road cost double the estimate or why a state company wrote off a loan to a friend of a minister. Newspapers report its sessions closely. Much of what the public knows about waste in government comes out of this one room.
Who held the chair before him?
| Assembly | Chairman | Party at the time |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 to 2013 | Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, then others | PML-N, then in opposition |
| 2013 to 2018 | Syed Khursheed Shah | PPP, in opposition |
| 2018 to 2022 | Shehbaz Sharif, then Rana Tanveer Hussain | PML-N, in opposition |
| 2022 to 2023 | Noor Alam Khan | A dissident from the PTI, after that party left the assembly |
| From January 2025 | Junaid Akbar | PTI-backed, in opposition |
The list shows how weighty the post is. Three of his predecessors held it as Leader of the Opposition, and one of them went on to become Prime Minister. It also shows how new he is to this level of politics. Each of the others had been a minister or a party leader before taking the chair. He had been neither.
His record in the chair
Press reports from 2025 show the committee under his chairmanship taking up matters of public anger. In July 2025, amid a steep rise in the price of sugar, it demanded the full list of mill owners who had been allowed to export sugar and the quantities involved.
The odd episode of May 2025
In May 2025 there were reports that Imran Khan wanted him to give up the chair, apparently so that it could go to another party figure. He was reported to have submitted his resignation. Within days the instruction was said to have been reversed, and he announced that he was staying.
The episode showed two things. Decisions in the PTI are made by one man in a prison cell, communicated through visitors, and can change quickly. And even a committee chair elected by Parliament is treated by the party as a post in the leader’s gift.
✅ Key point
A party whose leader is in jail has a problem of communication. Instructions come out through lawyers and family members who are allowed to visit. Different visitors sometimes report different instructions. Office-holders outside cannot telephone to check. The result is a party in which orders are announced, contradicted and reversed in public. His brief “resignation” was one small example.
Leading the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
His second job is harder to describe, because a party president’s work is mostly out of sight.
| Task | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Organisation | Appointing district and tehsil office-holders across the province |
| Mobilisation | Getting workers out for rallies and protest calls |
| Discipline | Managing quarrels between factions and between the party and its own provincial government |
| Tickets | A large say in who gets the party’s nomination at the next election |
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the PTI’s base. It is the one province the party governs. So its provincial president is, in practice, one of the most important people in the party who is not in prison.
The job has been complicated by the party’s internal tensions. For most of 2025 he led the organisation while a rival led the provincial government. In October 2025 that rival, Ali Amin Gandapur, resigned as Chief Minister on Imran Khan’s instructions and was replaced by Sohail Afridi.
Whether he still holds the party presidency in late 2026 could not be confirmed from a news report for this article.
⚠️ Check his current titles
Party posts in the PTI have changed often since 2023, sometimes with little notice. Before describing him as the party’s provincial president or as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, confirm it from a report dated this month or from the National Assembly’s list of committees. His membership of the assembly for NA-9 is confirmed by its website.
What supporters and critics say
Supporters say he is a loyal party worker with a real base, proved three times at the ballot box. They say he stood up for party workers against a high-handed chief minister and was vindicated. And they say the Public Accounts Committee has been more active under him than it was during the long vacancy.
Critics make other points. Rivals inside the PTI saw his group as troublemakers who weakened the provincial government at a difficult time. Opponents of the PTI say he had no national profile or relevant experience before being handed the committee, and that he owes both posts to factional politics. And some note that the committee, like its predecessors, has produced more headlines than recoveries.
Each view has merit. He was a compromise choice for one post and a factional choice for the other. But both needed filling, and in each case he was the candidate the different sides could accept.
Words used in this article
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| PAC | Public Accounts Committee |
| Auditor General | The independent official who audits the government’s accounts |
| Audit paragraph | A written objection by the auditors to a particular payment or decision |
| Principal accounting officer | The senior civil servant answerable for a ministry’s spending |
| Focal person | A person named as the point of contact between two bodies |
| Provincial president | The head of a party’s organisation in a province |
| PTI-backed independent | A candidate who stood without a party symbol in 2024 but with the PTI’s support |
| Backbencher | A member of Parliament who holds no office |
Timeline: Junaid Akbar at a glance
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1977 | Born in Malakand |
| May 2013 | First elected to the National Assembly |
| July 2018 | Re-elected, defeating Bilawal Bhutto Zardari |
| January 2023 | His term ends when the PTI’s resignations are accepted |
| February 2024 | Elected for a third time; takes the oath on 29 February |
| 2024 | Made the Chief Minister’s focal person, then removed amid a party rift |
| 24 January 2025 | Elected chairman of the Public Accounts Committee |
| 25 January 2025 | Appointed president of the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa |
| May 2025 | Reported to have resigned the committee chair, then to have stayed |
| July 2025 | The committee demands records of sugar exporters |
| October 2025 | Ali Amin Gandapur is replaced as Chief Minister |
Why his story matters
- It shows who runs the PTI now. The party’s second line, local winners with safe seats, has moved up.
- It shows the value of the Public Accounts Committee. A year without a chairman was a year in which nobody in Parliament examined the audit reports.
- It shows the PPP’s lost ground. The man who beat its chairman in 2018 now wins the same seat by a margin of three to one.
To see how the assembly and its committees work, read our explainer on the National Assembly and our plain-English guide to Pakistan’s politics.
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Frequently asked questions
❓ Who is Junaid Akbar?
He is a PTI politician from Malakand who has been elected to the National Assembly three times. Since January 2025 he has chaired the Public Accounts Committee and led the PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
❓ Which constituency does Junaid Akbar represent?
NA-9 Malakand in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
❓ Did Junaid Akbar defeat Bilawal Bhutto Zardari?
Yes. In the 2018 general election he won NA-8 Malakand with 81,310 votes, defeating the PPP’s chairman.
❓ What is Junaid Akbar’s age?
He was born in 1977. Sources give two different dates in that year.
❓ Who is Junaid Akbar’s father?
His National Assembly profile gives his father’s name as Sultan Rome.
❓ What is the Public Accounts Committee?
It is the committee of the National Assembly that examines the Auditor General’s reports on how the government spent public money. By convention it is chaired by a member of the opposition.
❓ When did Junaid Akbar become PTI’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa president?
Imran Khan appointed him on 25 January 2025, in place of Ali Amin Gandapur.
❓ Why is Junaid Akbar listed as an independent?
The PTI lost its election symbol before the 2024 election, so its candidates stood as independents. The assembly’s website still lists them that way.
❓ Did Junaid Akbar resign as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee?
In May 2025 he was reported to have resigned on Imran Khan’s instructions and then to have withdrawn the resignation when the instruction was reversed.
Sources
- National Assembly of Pakistan, member profile: Mr. Junaid Akbar — read on 8 October 2026.
- Wikipedia, “Junaid Akbar” — as last edited on 25 September 2026.
- Arab News, “Parliament elects ex-PM Khan aide as head of accountability body amid Pakistan political tensions” — January 2025.
- Daily Pakistan, “Junaid Akbar replaces Ali Amin Gandapur as new KP president” — 25 January 2025.
- Geo News, “Imran flips stance, asks Junaid Akbar to stay on as PAC chairman” — May 2025.
- The News, “Imran Khan wants Junaid Akbar to relinquish PAC chair” — May 2025.
- Nukta, “Opposition takes control of Pakistan’s finance watchdog committee after year-long standoff” — January 2025.
