Maize is the largest cereal crop in Nigeria by tonnage — roughly 12 million tonnes a year — and the staple of the middle belt, the brewers, the poultry industry, and the dry-milled flour mills. Almost none of that volume rests on imported hybrids. It rests on the SAMMAZ series out of the Institute for Agricultural Research (IAR), Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru, Zaria.
## The series
The acronym is institutional: SAMaru MAiZe. The first numbered release, SAMMAZ 1, was gazetted in 1988. By 2024, the National Variety Release Committee had registered at least 67 SAMMAZ varieties — open-pollinated and hybrid, white and yellow, early- and medium- and late-maturing, drought-tolerant, striga-resistant, quality-protein-enriched, and (most recently) Tela GM stacks for fall-armyworm resistance.
A running selection:
- SAMMAZ 11, 14, 15 — early-maturing OPVs for the Sudan savanna; ~95 days from planting to harvest. The backbone of food-security maize across Kano, Katsina and Jigawa.
- SAMMAZ 16, 26, 27 — quality protein maize (QPM) varieties with elevated lysine and tryptophan, addressing protein-energy malnutrition in weaning diets.
- SAMMAZ 32, 34 — drought-tolerant releases bred under the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) partnership.
- SAMMAZ 39, 41, 43 — striga-resistant lines, *Striga hermonthica* being the single most destructive parasitic weed in northern Nigerian maize.
- SAMMAZ 51 onward — hybrid releases for the commercial milling sector (Olam, Flour Mills, Premier Foods).
- SAMMAZ 72 / TELA Maize — Bt (Cry1Ab) + Roundup-Ready stack, commercially released by NBMA in January 2024 — Nigeria's second commercial GM food crop after Tela cowpea.
The IAR maize programme has been led across three generations by Professors S. G. Ado, S. O. Alabi, A. Menkir, B. Badu-Apraku and most recently A. Y. Kamara. The breeding pipeline is the *only* continuously funded plant-breeding programme on a Nigerian university campus that has not had a multi-year interruption since the structural adjustment crisis of 1986–88.
## What it changed
Nigerian maize yields rose from ~1.2 t/ha in the early 1980s to ~2.0 t/ha by the late 2010s — small in absolute terms next to South African 5 t/ha, but representing roughly a doubling under conditions of declining soil fertility, declining rainfall reliability, and almost no irrigation. Almost all of that yield gain is attributable to SAMMAZ releases combined with modest fertiliser intensification.
The brewers matter too. Nigerian Breweries, Guinness Nigeria and International Breweries reformulated to a 60–70% sorghum/maize mash through the late 1980s and 1990s under the federal grain-import ban; SAMMAZ and SAMSORG varieties made that substitution agronomically possible.
## What it has not yet changed
Farmer-saved-seed rates for OPV SAMMAZ varieties remain above 70%; hybrid adoption is concentrated among commercial farms above 5 ha. The federal seed council certification system is patchy enough that adulterated 'SAMMAZ' seed circulates, particularly in the Niger, Plateau and Kaduna belts. The 2024 Tela Maize release will be the first SAMMAZ release subject to formal stewardship and refuge requirements.
## Why this is a Niprisan-rule breakthrough
A continuous, in-country, federal-institute-led plant-breeding programme running across thirty-six years; over sixty internationally certified releases; a documented contribution to a doubling of national yield; the technical capacity inside a Nigerian university to host the breeding, the molecular-marker work, the multi-location trials, the seed-tracking, and now the GM stewardship. SAMMAZ is the largest sustained scientific success of any Nigerian federal research institute — and almost nobody outside agricultural science knows the name.