ISLAMABAD — The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has retained Junaid Akbar Khan as its president for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and ruled out any organisational changes in the province, formalising the party’s chain of command while Akbar remains missing following the imposition of governor’s rule in the province, PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan announced in a notification shared on his X account on October 24, according to Pakistani media reports.
The notification said that in Akbar’s absence, Senator Noor-ul-Haq Qadri will preside over party meetings and perform his duties in accordance with the party constitution, while the PTI’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa general secretary, Ali Asghar Khan, will oversee all organisational matters. It clarified that no changes of any kind will be made to the party’s current organisational structure until further orders — a signal that the leadership intends to hold its existing team in place rather than rebuild the provincial organisation while its elected government is out of office and several of its figures are missing or detained.
A public rift behind the announcement
The decision followed a public dispute between PTI Secretary General Salman Akram Raja and former chief minister Ali Amin Gandapur over the provincial leadership. Raja had alleged that “undemocratic decision-makers” were attempting to undermine internal consensus, referring to what he described as a narrative that 68 members of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly were preparing to announce a provincial president and a candidate for the next chief minister without the approval of PTI founder Imran Khan and the party’s political committee. Raja also said the group had cut off contact with Chief Minister Sohail Afridi and his team in the final days of the protest, potentially paving the way for what he called state coercion, an emergency and governor’s rule in the province, according to the reports.
Gandapur rejected the allegations and demanded that Raja substantiate them and apologise. The dispute intensified following a purported audio recording in which Gandapur allegedly blamed Raja’s mismanagement and flawed planning for the provincial government’s dismissal — a recording the Express Tribune said it could not independently verify. Gohar sought to contain the fallout, telling media he had spoken to the leaders involved and urged them to stop issuing statements against one another, and maintaining that the party’s provincial lawmakers remained united and that Afridi remained the party’s choice for chief minister.
The wider standoff
The organisational decision comes two weeks into a constitutional confrontation over the province. The federal government imposed emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on October 11, removing Afridi’s PTI government; Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif defended the step in Peshawar this week and promised Rs160 billion in development funds, while the PTI has challenged the intervention in the Peshawar High Court as unconstitutional and demanded the elected government’s restoration. Party spokesperson Zulfikar Bukhari has described the move as “more of a coup disguised as emergency,” while the government says the provincial administration had disengaged from the fight against terrorism — charges each side disputes.
What happens next
By keeping a missing man in post and delegating his duties to named stand-ins, the PTI is telling its workers that the provincial organisation will not be rearranged in the absence of its leaders — and, implicitly, that leadership changes require Imran Khan’s approval, which must come from a prison cell. How long that holding structure can run a province-wide party, with its chief minister removed, its president missing and its founder jailed, will be tested by the court fight over governor’s rule and by whether the Raja-Gandapur truce holds.
Sources: Centreline, October 24, 2026 — PTI retains ‘missing’ Junaid Akbar as KP president, rules out organisational changes; Express Tribune reporting, October 2026, via Shafaqna.
