Former African National Congress (ANC) president Thabo Mbeki says the membership quality in the party has degenerated over the years, making it hard for people to maintain trust in the governing party.

Mbeki was addressing an ANC election gathering in Parktown, Johannesburg, on Thursday, where he dissected the party's manifesto which aims to attract voters ahead of the municipal elections on 1 November.

He said the ANC faced the challenge of leadership where it could not be fully confident of the leaders it put forward for people to support.

An example of how unconfident the party was of its leaders, it decided to involve communities in its candidate selection process for the 2021 elections.

The party has not undertaken public involvement before.

Mbeki said instead of this reflecting that the ANC was attempting to cushion its image, it reflected the party's declining quality of leadership.

He quoted former ANC president Nelson Mandela's 1997 speech which raised concerns about the impact of membership and careerism in the party.

Mbeki also quoted speeches by former ANC secretary-generals Gwede Mantashe and Kgalema Motlanthe who both spoke on the decay in leadership quality.

He said the ANC faced a crisis of how to deal with this problem and so far had yet to find a solution.

Mbeki told a group of business leaders: The ANC leadership has recognised this for many years. The problem is how do you deal with it? What do you do? It has always been difficult to deal with this problem.

He said key to the ANC's revival was for the party to ensure its renewal.

"How do you entrust an organisation that is not renewed with the task of producing the kind of candidates that you want? You can't.

"A properly functioning branch of the ANC would not need to take special measures to understand the community in this ward. You would know what type of candidate is workable in this community, but because we do not have the branches of that kind we had to get into these measures," Mbeki added.

"We called on the community to please help us."