Abstract: A nursery experiment was conducted during the dry season of 2003 to March 2004, at the Lake Chad Research Institute Maiduguri, Nigeria under irrigation with 10 (ten) pearl millet inbred lines to form an F1 population by crossing in all possible combinations excluding reciprocals through diallel (Griffing’s Method 2 Model 1). The 45 hybrids and the 10 parental lines were evaluated during the cropping seasons of 2004 and 2005 at two locations, Maiduguri and Yola, Nigeria in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that there were significant differences among the entries for most of the traits evaluated. Both additive and non-additive genetic effects were involved in the control of the traits, but non-additive genetic effect was the most important in that regard. This study identified ACC-1022-1-2SPT and SOSAT-C88 as the best parents in total grain yield considering there per se performance. The parents, BONKOK-SHORT, DMR 43, DMR22 and LCIC9702 were identified as the best general combiners in terms of GCA effects. The hybrids DMR22xLCIC9702, DMR43xLCIC9702, DMR22xLCIC9703-27, D2P29xEX-BORNO were observed to have recorded the highest SCA effects in various traits. Similarly, the hybrids D2P29xDMR43, DMR22xLCIC9702, DMR43xLCIC9702, BONKOK-SHORTxSOSAT-C88 and D2P29xEX-BORNO were the highest in terms of per se performance. It has been observed however, that some hybrids with high SCA effects were also high in per se performance. A fair general parallelism existed in most cases between GCA effects and the performance of the parental lines per se. Similar general parallelism also existed between SCA effects and per se performance of hybrids and between SCA effects of hybrids and levels of higher parent heterosis. Considerable higher parent heterosis was exhibited among the hybrids in almost all the traits. Higher parent heterosis of 85.13 and 114.05 for yield per plant and total grain yield per hectare, respectively were obtained in this study. There is therefore a great potential for the production of hybrid pearl millet varieties with increased total grain yield. The preponderance of non-additive genetic effect and the tremendous levels of higher parent heterosis observed among the traits in the parents and the hybrids studied would be great asset in choosing pearl millet cultivars for inter crossing and development of varieties and hybrids for commercial production.