The man who gave away an empire and started over

From Rawalpindi to NADRA: an IT career that almost went to California

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation around a problem he sees as more fundamental than Pakistan’s economic or political crises: a social and moral deterioration driven by a failure to educate and equip the country’s enormous youth population. His guest, Chaudhry Junaid Afzaal, Chairman of Nova Group, is introduced as someone who has worked across non-profits, government, real estate, and education — a rare combination of vantage points.

Junaid was born in Wah and grew up in Rawalpindi, where his father had launched one of the city’s first private housing projects, Sher Zaman Colony, in 1976. The family moved to Pindi because of the project’s proximity to GHQ, which had recently shifted there and created genuine demand. Junaid notes that private housing was not a post-Bahria phenomenon — the requirement for organised residential development has always existed wherever cities grow.

His formal education ran through Saint Mary’s and then Sir Syed School and College, though he admits he nearly skipped his final exam entirely. A friend dragged him in at the last moment and he passed. By 1996 he had opened a computer college on College Road in Rawalpindi, teaching Visual Basic and networking to students at a time when very few institutions in Pakistan offered computer education. He ran it for eighteen months before selling his share to his partner.

He then enrolled at PETROMAN for a BCS while simultaneously pursuing Microsoft and Cisco certifications and gaining hands-on experience setting up internet service provider networks. A classified project approached him during his graduation — the contract required him not to travel abroad for five years. He had already applied to study at Berkeley, drawn by the fact that the first router had been invented there, so he turned the project down. He eventually completed a master’s in computer science at Bahria University while working for an international NGO managing their IT infrastructure.

In 2002, before finishing his master’s, he joined NADRA as Manager Technical.

Six years inside NADRA: passports, civil registration, and the e-Sahulat foundation

Muzamil asks what drew Junaid to a government authority when the private sector and international options were available. Junaid’s answer is less about career calculation and more about the scale of what NADRA was attempting. He describes the organisation in that period as genuinely exceptional.

“I think the will was there to change,” he says. “There was a time when I used to sleep only for three hours. That will, that drive — we put enormous effort into it.”

The projects he worked on included the swift processing centres that replaced manual form handling, the machine-readable passport system, an arms licence project, and international contracts for Kenya’s ID card system and Bangladesh’s driving licence system. He also led the digitisation of all CNIC records from 1973 — when ID cards first became constitutionally mandatory — through to 2003, making 125 physical record offices redundant and eventually allowing NADRA to become self-sustaining without government funding.

His final project at NADRA was e-Sahulat, which for the first time integrated Pakistani currency into cash-acceptance machines. The system allowed utility bill payments at retail points around the clock, pulling WAPDA, SSGC, SNGPL, and all major telcos onto a single platform. Junaid argues that e-Sahulat was the foundation on which later mobile payment platforms like EasyPaisa and UPaisa were built — the government’s neutral position meant the private players could not fight over territory in the way they would have if a commercial entity had built it first.

He also describes a pilot civil registration project in 150 union councils of Lahore and 15 in Sialkot, training union council secretaries — often minimally qualified — to operate the system. It was later replicated nationally.

Muzamil presses on why NADRA worked when most government institutions do not. Junaid’s answer is that the will existed at every level, and that the legal structure gave the authority enough autonomy to act. He does not claim a structural formula — he credits the people and the drive of that particular moment.

Joining the family business and building a twelve-year empire

Junaid left NADRA in 2006, initially to take up another opportunity he describes only as a large-scale project with significant national benefit. Before he could join, a fraud problem surfaced in the family’s real estate business and his uncle asked his mother to send Junaid to help. He sorted out the accounts and systems, and his uncle then asked him to stay permanently. Out of respect for his mother, he agreed.

He walked into a market that had just collapsed. The property boom of 2002 to 2006 had ended, construction costs had roughly doubled overnight — diesel went from 38.5 rupees to 100 — and the family had deliberately sat out the boom years. They started their first project, New City in Wah, in 2006 and handed over possession in 2009. That delivery track record, Junaid argues, was the turning point: genuine demand cannot be extinguished, and a project that actually delivers will always find buyers.

Over the next twelve years he mastered every aspect of the business. He describes learning to identify errors in the work of engineers and town planners, and eventually doing much of that work himself. New City grew to include a main boulevard fourteen kilometres long — one of the longest in any private housing project in Pakistan.

Then, in 2018, family succession dynamics led to a distribution of assets. What happened next is the moment Muzamil finds most striking.

“I might be — I cannot find such an example in human history — I gifted that entire empire which was built in the twelve years from 2006 to 2018. I gifted that entire empire and I said that I’ll start again.”

He took nothing. His uncle came to him and urged him to take something. Junaid told him: “If Allah has not written this for me, it would have remained a burden. And if Allah wants to give me more from less, He will.”

Within three to four years, the projects he built under Nova Group exceeded the scale of what he had handed over.

Nova City, a 64-floor tower in Lahore, and why housing is the hardest job in Pakistan

After 2018, Junaid initially decided to move away from housing societies entirely. “It is the most difficult occupation in Pakistan,” he says. “You can count the successful projects on your fingers. The failures are countless.” He says he would not ask his own children to do it.

He was pulled back in by a cousin who took him to a site and, after Junaid told him the project was beyond his capability, said: “I don’t want to build it — you do.” That became Nova City Islamabad, near the airport.

Nova Group now has three major projects running. The Lahore project is a multipurpose tower — commercial mall, five-star hotel, serviced apartments, and offices — that will stand approximately 750 feet tall across 63 to 64 floors, making it likely the tallest building in Lahore. Italian firms are handling design, supervision, and construction because Pakistan has limited expertise at that height, and the collaboration is also a technology transfer: construction methods that reduce the building’s weight will bring down costs and create a template for future projects. Construction has been paused given current economic conditions, though two international financial institutions have approached Nova for financing even in this environment.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil and Junaid go deep on what is structurally wrong with Pakistan’s real estate sector. Muzamil frames it as a symptom problem: real estate thrives in Pakistan not because the economy is thriving but because it is the only thing thriving, and the entire language of the sector is investment-oriented rather than home-oriented. Junaid agrees that the pump-and-dump dynamic needs to be checked, but insists the legitimate sector cannot be collapsed — the housing deficit is real and will not disappear.

His prescription has three parts. First, involve industry stakeholders in policy rather than making decisions in drawing rooms. Second, create a certification and supervision mechanism that distinguishes clean projects from fraudulent ones, with a pathway for grey-area projects to become compliant. Third, facilitate low-cost housing directly: he cites an Italian construction group, Trodini, that builds units resistant to a 13-Richter earthquake and providing 15-degree weather insulation, and notes that the Italian government subsidised retrofitting existing homes at 110 percent of cost to reduce energy consumption. Pakistan needs similar facilitation for affordable construction.

On financing, Junaid is direct: globally, 60 to 70 percent of real estate is financed by banks. In Pakistan, the State Bank has kept the sector underfinanced, partly in response to concerns about overvaluation. He argues the policy needs to be relaxed because the circulation of money through real estate touches forty allied industries and cannot be ignored.

Nova City School: hiring a banker as headmistress and teaching elephants to fly

In 2016, two years before the empire handover, Junaid started what would become Nova City School. The trigger was partly commercial — good schools raise property values in any vicinity — and partly personal. He had watched a Jackie Chan documentary in which Chan would return to Hong Kong after unsatisfying Hollywood productions and make a film that corrected everything he felt was missing. Junaid wanted to do the same for Pakistan’s education system.

The school’s most unusual feature is its leadership. “Our entire team — school management, decisions, curriculum, planning, everything — they are not educationists,” Junaid tells Muzamil. The principal is a PhD who spent twelve years in the United States. The head of management is a former banker. Junaid hand-picked people with potential rather than credentials in education, on the theory that career teachers are too conditioned by the existing system to build something genuinely different.

The curriculum has three pillars. The first is character education. Junaid argues that the compression of family time — working parents, absent grandparents, screens replacing intergenerational conversation — has stripped children of the values that used to be transmitted informally. When he began designing the character curriculum, he found there was not a single book on character education for children in Pakistan. The school wrote its own, grounded in Islamic principles. Exercises include asking children to kiss their mother’s hand and record her reaction, and writing ten thank-you notes to their father — structured prompts designed to rebuild emotional bonds that have eroded.

The second pillar is entrepreneurship, built around a US-designed curriculum. The school runs children through a complete entrepreneurship cycle. Junaid describes asking teachers to write four good things about themselves as a warm-up exercise: most fell silent. “We don’t give time to ourselves. We judge others. We’ve stopped thinking about ourselves. Entrepreneurship is a complete mindset.”

The third pillar is robotics, taught from preschool. The first exercise for playgroup children is: “Can elephants fly?” After collecting answers, the teacher shows them the Dumbo cartoon. The point is to protect and extend the imagination before the school system narrows it.

On the choice of IB over O-levels, Junaid is unequivocal. IB currently holds less than five percent of schools and students globally, but accounts for fifty percent of admissions at top universities. “Their thought process, their personality grooming — everything is a thousand times better.” He predicts the balance will shift in coming years and says he has already told the IB team he intends to improve their programme further.

To solve the teacher talent problem, the school stopped hiring experienced teachers and instead takes fresh graduates through a six-month training programme. Retention is high because the school promotes teaching assistants to coordinators faster than most institutions would. There is now a waiting list for the training programme itself.

By the time of recording, two campuses were running with approximately 2,000 to 2,500 students. A third campus in Islamabad was opening the following month. A fourth location in Lahore was planned for the following year — the first campus outside a Nova Group town.

The macro problem: earning ten, spending twenty

Muzamil asks Junaid to step back from the sector and address the broader economy. His framing is that Pakistan is now in what he calls “the mother of all busts” — a structural crisis that cannot be resolved by another IMF tranche or a friendly loan from a Gulf state.

Junaid does not claim macroeconomic expertise but offers a layman’s diagnosis that is hard to argue with. “Our earnings are ten rupees and our expenditure is twenty. We have been borrowing the other ten to survive. Now returning that loan costs us thirty rupees, while our income is still ten. We have to increase income or reduce expenses.”

He argues that the immediate lever is taxation — not by adding burden to existing taxpayers but by bringing the unregistered majority into the net. He cites two surveys: one from 2004 in which CBR cross-referenced phone bills, car ownership, and utility consumption against declared taxes and found widespread non-compliance (the report was shelved when prominent names appeared); and a more recent survey in Islamabad that found fewer than 2,000 registered businesses against more than 20,000 identifiable shops and commercial premises. “You have an IT background,” he tells Muzamil. “It’s a matter of one month. You can identify everything. All the data exists. Everything can be linked.”

For the longer term, he argues that industrialisation must be led by the private sector with government backing, and that Pakistan needs to take some different international positions to attract that investment. He is clear-eyed that industrialisation’s yield is four to five years away, which means the short-term survival problem is separate and equally urgent.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Junaid where he sees Pakistan in 2050. Junaid’s answer is conditional but not pessimistic. “If we take the right decisions today, there is no force that can stop Pakistan’s emergence and its economic boom. The potential is there — the minerals, the agriculture. We just need the right people to take those decisions.” He adds that he believes people will eventually be forced to that point by circumstances, and that once they are, Pakistan could be the best-performing economy in the world within twenty-five years.

His vision for Nova Group is equally long-range. “Legacy starts after your lifetime. I want people to remember me for doing something for the community and for the country.” On the business side, he expects Nova to become an international major group of companies within that same window.