From soccer player, teacher, school principal and now Educational Psychology doctor.
No one saw it coming, excuse the pun, but the 57-year-old Orlando Pirates legend, Bernard "Shoes" Lushozi, has always had the heart for Learning Support Guidance.
Lushozi retired from playing football while still in the books of Pirates in 1998 and pursued his long-time dream of being a teacher.
He started being the classroom teacher at the Modderbee Correctional Services, Benoni in 1999, the following year after retirement.
He was the teacher of prisoners, something that he says has changed his life forever.
"Some of the things that I've discovered from the school was that most of the prisoners were not hardcore criminals, but some were intellectually challenged," said the soft-spoken Lushozi who has gone completely last year in both eyes.
"At school, most of the pupils are told that they're silly, 'o stout-o-stout', and they end up following it that they're silly. That was description labelling that affected them, but deep down they were intellectually challenged, and the teachers could not pick that up.
"Learning disability is a serious problem which most people cannot identify, and that prompted me to focus on children with learning disabilities. I ended up learning intellectual disability. That was the main subject of the matter for me.
"He said he enrolled with Wits University for an Honours degree in Educational Psychology, "and I finished it at the University of Pretoria".
"My friends convinced me to go for Masters degree thereafter," he revealed.
According to him, he was one of the eight, "out of over 300 students, who passed" and all of them were white students.
"From that day, I told myself that I will go for a PhD. The results from my Masters encouraged me to go for PhD," he said.
"My space of interest was intellectual disability and the people from special schools. Our special schools are not what they should be, to help solve the problem. The teachers had to be taught proper to teach at special schools. It's about building an individual with their intellectual disability."
He became a school principal in 2004 at the Albertina Sisulu Centre in Orlando West, Soweto, a school with special education needs, to date.
"Another challenge there was that most of our white counterparts are all armed with PhDs, they are doctor-something. They understood that to be able to manage such students you need to be an expert in that field. With little knowledge of education, you cannot manage a diverse inter-disciplinary students.
"How do you supervise a therapist when you know nothing about occupational therapy? This is why I was prompted to go for this one because principals are given a high job, which they cannot handle."
He said his graduation with a PhD was a bit late because he was supposed to have been ordained in April 2020, however, his eye surgeries delayed him.
"When I went blind, I was already in chapter three of my thesis, and I request extension from the university, and it was granted. From there onwards, I asked my wife to start writing for me (in dictate). She was typing for me when I told her. I was at the final stages of my thesis," said Lushozi.
Last year April that is when he completely lost eyesight.It all started in 2019 with one eye and the other following in 2020, due to diabetes.
He said the problem was that he left his diabetes unattended, which was the real cause of the problem.
"When we grew up, doctors warned us about smoking, drinking and living a healthy lifestyle, and we never listened," he advised.
He boasted that his PhD degree is not just for cosmetic reasons, but "I wanted to affect the lives of those people who had real intellectual disability".
Lushozi is still principal but unable to go to school physically due to his challenges."I will be learning braille from next year," he concluded.
