The fifth and final evacuation flight from South Africa lands in Lagos this morning. It took five weeks and five separate trips to bring everyone home who asked.

An Air Peace flight carrying 315 Nigerians departed Johannesburg at 1.30am and is due into Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos at 6.30am today. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says this closes the evacuation exercise it opened on 11 June. It followed renewed xenophobic attacks and security concerns for Nigerians living in parts of South Africa.

The numbers, added up, are not small. Before today's flight, four earlier evacuations had already brought home over 1,100 Nigerians, on top of smaller private and charter arrangements that moved dozens more. Today's 315 pushes the total for this single crisis response past 1,450 people.

Behind those numbers is a specific kind of fear. The attacks that triggered this exercise targeted foreign nationals in parts of South Africa, Nigerians among them. It was the kind of violence that spreads through a neighbourhood by rumour before it spreads by news report. For someone renting a room in Johannesburg or running a small shop in a township, the calculation is not abstract. It's whether tonight is the night it reaches your street.

Underneath that number is how it actually gets done. Nigeria has no legal obligation to evacuate citizens caught in a security crisis abroad, and nothing standing that automatically triggers when one happens. Each flight had to be separately organised, funded and scheduled with Air Peace, coordinated against the safety situation on the ground. It was also limited to people who actively registered interest in returning. Somebody in Johannesburg who didn't hear about the registration window, or couldn't get to a collection point, is not on today's manifest. Somebody without a valid passport, or with debts to settle before they could leave, isn't either.

That is the honest shape of what worked here. When the Nigerian state decides to move for its citizens abroad, it can move, five times over five weeks, and land a plane. It is real protection, and it reached over a thousand people who might otherwise have been stranded in a country where they no longer felt safe.

It also tells you what the model depends on. Not on the state finding its citizens. On its citizens finding the flight.