In a speech to parliament on 7 January 1964, only fifteen months after independence, Prime Minister Milton Obote formally endorsed a one-party political system. Pointing to the regional models of Jomo Kenyatta's Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Julius Nyerere's Tanganyika (later Tanzania) African National Union (TANU), Obote argued that a one-party state does not inevitably prevent criticism or the free expression of opinion. Dismissing political opposition as a bourgeois, ‘capitalist’ notion imported from the colonial West, the prime minister announced that Uganda ‘had rejected capitalism once and for all’, and he castigated Uganda's opposition – the Democratic Party (DP) – for being ‘subversive and irresponsible’. For Obote, UPC could and should be the vehicle for representing the political interests of all Ugandans.

Benedicto Kiwanuka did not delay in his response. In a press release issued the next day, Kiwanuka exhorted his DP supporters and his fellow Ugandans to embrace a politics of resistance. For Kiwanuka, Obote's statement merely confirmed his long-standing suspicion that the prime minister harboured ambitions of serving as ‘prime minister for life’, aided and abetted by a UPC that championed ‘deceipt [sic], nepotism, and self-aggrandisement’. In contrast, Kiwanuka and DP had made a covenant with democracy: ‘We, as a group, are wedded to democracy, and we are wedded for all time’. Ultimately, Uganda was a ‘free nation’, and the Ugandan people would not stand idly by while a ‘group of power-hungry men take this away from us. We will die rather than give in.’ In Eucharistic overtones reflective of Catholic theology, Kiwanuka placed himself in the persona Christi, offering his life as a political martyr to Uganda in the face of creeping dictatorship.