Before 1973, Nigeria was the world's largest groundnut exporter. The famous photographs of the Kano groundnut pyramids — bagged groundnuts stacked thirty feet high awaiting rail to Lagos — were the visible peak of an export economy that paid for the railways, the early Northern budgets, and Ahmadu Bello University itself.
The 1975–76 groundnut rosette virus epidemic, transmitted by *Aphis craccivora*, destroyed the crop across the Sudan and Sahel belts. By 1978 Nigeria had become a net importer of groundnut oil. The Institute for Agricultural Research, ABU Zaria — under successive groundnut breeders including Olaoye, Misari, Mohammed and (later) Ajeigbe — rebuilt the breeding programme around two criteria: rosette resistance and short maturity for the Sahel rainfall window.
The releases came in numbered series. SAMNUT 10 (1976), 11, 14, 22 (rosette-resistant), 23, 24, 25 (drought-tolerant Sahel types), and most recently the SAMNUT 26 and 27 lines bred for the southern Sahel of Borno, Yobe and Jigawa. The current programme is in partnership with ICRISAT and the Tropical Legumes initiative.
Nigerian groundnut production has slowly recovered to about 4.5 million tonnes a year — second only to China and India globally. The pyramids are gone for good (the rail system that moved them never came back), but the breeding programme that quietly carried the crop through fifty years of policy chaos is one of the catalogue's most undramatic and most consequential survivals.