It is 3.41am on Saturday January 7, 2012, a day before the celebrations of the founding of the ANC a hundred years ago, and there is nothing revolutionary about the Cubana cafe in Bloemfontein.

As the sun rises in the east, inside and outside the cafe/club the rising light reveals the signs of the crass, conspicuous consumption we have come to expect of the ANC, not signs of the revolution the party set out to achieve. The evidence of the night's partying looks more like a Bacchanalian bankers' feast than an ANC celebration: outside in the streets of Bloemfontein Range Rovers, massive Mercs and BMWs clog the streets.

Inside, ANC leaders enjoy Moët et Chandon champagne in massive quantities. No one, it seems, has ever tasted the fabulous qualities of the vast array of South African sparkling wine. This is not about enjoyment, though. It is about showing that one has arrived. It is not about good champagne. It is about showing that one can afford expensive stuff. It is about the label, the price tag, and not what's inside the bottle.

The ANC's arrival in this sleepy town has attracted its elites from across the country. And if the ANC has succeeded at anything it is at enriching a narrow black elite, and we are not afraid of showing it. In Mangaung it is not show me my machine gun. It is more like show me how big your car is. That is the measure of our success.

The machine gun is there, too, though. At 4am, as the music stops and Cubana shuts down, President Jacob Zuma's supporters start singing in praise of him. The songs start here, there and everywhere in the club. It is a variety of songs, including the infamous Umshini Wami.

"They are drunk," says a fuming ANC business luminary who was pivotal to the rise of Zuma in the run-up to the ANC's Polokwane conference in 2007. "What about sympathy for Julius Malema?" he asks.

Behind the speeches and the public celebrations of the ANC at its centenary, there is no doubt that this house is creaky and may fall. Noble and admirable as the ANC's 82 years of struggle are, there is no doubt that 18 years of power have presented extraordinary challenges to the continent's oldest liberation movement.

In Mangaung these challenges are writ large: societal poverty cheek by jowl with vulgar displays of affluence by party luminaries, institutional decay and creeping moral ambiguity.

Don't be fooled, though, into thinking that the ANC's narrative will be one of decline and inevitable destruction over the next decade. The ANC has faced some serious challenges in the past and not just survived - it has emerged from some of its trials and tribulations even stronger. The departure of the so-called Africanists after the adoption of the Freedom Charter was supposedly the death knell of the ANC. It was not. Exile, violence and dissent in its camps, merciless tactics by the apartheid government, imprisonment of its leaders - these are just some of the things the ANC has survived.

January 8 2012 is a beautiful day. One mustn't be churlish. The ANC's history of struggle is something to be celebrated by all. Nothing makes me prouder than what those great men and women selflessly and bravely gave up for all of us and the freedoms we enjoy.

Despite this, the truth is that this ANC is in trouble and faces terminal decline. Eighteen years in power has been challenging. The most heated discussion points at the Mangaung celebrations among many of those attending have been about leadership. There is no doubt that, even among his supporters, Zuma is seen as an intellectual flyweight whose tenure in the Union Buildings has been a rudderless, scriptless farce. His picture alongside those of his predecessors is jarring for many: he just has not displayed the intellectual rigour and exemplary leadership displayed by his predecessors.

Zuma's poor leadership is not his problem alone, though. These current ANC leaders campaigned for him and elected him. They got the leader they deserved. If Zuma is a problem, the people who lined him up next to OR Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli have a serious problem too.

That problem is generally that the quality of an ANC member today is not as good as the quality of an ANC member in 1980 or in 1923. The ANC member today drinks Moët out of a bottle to show his arrival at the gates of Mammon. Sol Plaatje would have asked how champagne is made and would have tried to apply that to local conditions.

These are the ANC members who are making the most noise at ANC shindigs. They are becoming the face of the ANC. They are the ANC today, and we will see more and more of them over the next few years. They are all form and no substance.

So the two key questions for the ANC at 100 are the following.

First, what kind of leadership is needed to yank the party back into the ethical straight and narrow and focus on poverty eradication (as opposed to the current crass enrichment of a narrow elite) and development? Second, how does one root out the "it's our turn to eat" mentality that the Zuma-era ANC membership has come to exemplify? How does one stop ANC membership and leadership being used merely to open the doors to corrupt self-enrichment as exemplified by the scandals emanating from Mpumalanga and Limpopo?

Gwede Mantashe, the ANC secretary-general, recently bemoaned the fact that many of Africa's liberation movements are not just out of power but cannot even win a single seat in parliamentary elections. Mantashe and his comrades know full well why this is so. It is because, when those organisations faced what the ANC faces today, they just continued the slide down into poor leadership and corruption. If the ANC fails to act it will face the same slide into ignominy.