Tip of the day: For anyone out there with CentOS 5, despite what Passenger thinks, your http-devel libraries likely are installed.
I was getting an error "you need to yum install http-devel" , which I had, but still getting the error.
If like me, the export APXS2 as per passenger docs doesn't work, just add "/usr/local/apache/bin/" into your profile path and passenger will then work fine (I just checked by ensuring axps ran at the command prompt before running the passenger module install)
In theory then you should be good to go...