Troops recorded a real breakthrough on Saturday. It wasn't the one two families are waiting for.

Saturday's statement from Operation Hadin Kai sounded like exactly the news Nigeria has been praying for. Troops had rescued six people in Chibok, including two infants, in a raid described as another major success in the campaign to recover the country's missing. The rescued victims were pulled from Talakawa after sustained air and ground pressure on fleeing gunmen.

Here is the detail that gets lost in the celebration. Those six people were taken in May, from Mussa community. They are not the 36 to 37 students still missing from Government Day Secondary School, Lassa, abducted on July 1 while sitting their NECO exams. Two different attacks. Two different registers of missing names. One rescue announcement doing the emotional work of both.

In Lassa, parents built their own list because the state government's numbers kept shifting between 36, 37 and 39. Premium Times independently confirmed 36 names through interviews with families, a register the state later corroborated. One father, Mr Simon, said nobody from the government or the abductors had contacted his family since the attack. His daughter isn't even one of the NECO candidates. She's in SS2. Nobody had told him why she was still gone.

Nine hundred kilometres away in Oyo State, a different set of families has been counting a different number entirely. This weekend marked 54 days since gunmen took 39 pupils and seven teachers from three schools in Orire. The Chief of Army Staff told journalists on Saturday that operations were making tremendous progress, the same word used about the Talakawa rescue. Fact-checkers have already had to correct false rumours that the Oyo victims had been freed. They haven't been. One teacher was killed in the first week to warn off pursuing troops.

This is the third mass school abduction Nigeria has recorded since May. Reuters counted at least 42 students still missing from an earlier Borno attack in the same stretch, on top of Oyo and Lassa. Three open cases running at once is not a new problem for Nigeria's security services. It is the same problem, in triplicate, happening simultaneously instead of one at a time.

Nigeria has lived this exact story before, on a much larger scale. In 2014, Boko Haram took 276 girls from a government school in Chibok, and the country learned then what it is relearning now. A rescue months later never quite closes the gap for the families still waiting, because the waiting itself becomes its own kind of permanent. More than 80 of the Chibok girls are still unaccounted for, over a decade later. Every "breakthrough" statement since has had to be measured against that memory, whether the military intends it or not.

The language doing the heavy lifting across all three current cases is the word progress. It is what the Chief of Army Staff told journalists about Oyo on Saturday. It is what Operation Hadin Kai's statement called the Talakawa rescue. Progress is true in both cases. It is also doing something else. It lets an institution describe forward motion without ever having to specify toward what, or for whom, or by when. A soldier can report progress every week for two years and never once be asked to say what finishing actually looks like.

None of this is an argument that the rescues aren't real. Six people came home to their families over the weekend because soldiers went and got them. That is not nothing. But a country holding three abductions open at the same time needs more than proof that its military can still fight. It needs proof that the fighting reaches the specific door where a specific family is still waiting. Right now the good news keeps arriving at a different address than the one it was meant for.

Somewhere in Lassa tonight, a father is still waiting for someone to call him back about his daughter. He isn't checking today's rescue statement. He already knows it wasn't about her.